Re: [Pan-users] Seeing contents of 'Sent' postings that were never posted

[Duncan]

Dave posted on Fri, 07 Dec 2018 21:17:58 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Fri, 07 Dec 2018 06:40:36 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 
>> But of course you're in a new session now, and while all the messages
>> sent in the last session should show up with the disc icon, any that
>> you send this session won't, because pan doesn't know they're actually
>> there yet.
> 
> So, is this a bug?  Should be report in case anyone has time to look at
> the code?

I guess it depends on how you look at it.

I consider it an idiosyncrasy here, not really a bug.  It's certainly a 
bug in some ways, but since sent messages is a faked newsgroup, there are 
limits to how well it emulates the real thing, and I've always simply 
considered that one of the limits inherent in the faking.

Put a different way, yes, it'd certainly be possible to program different 
behavior, with pan updating the status when you switch to that "group", 
but at least for me, because I knew the reason for the behavior, it 
didn't bother me /that/ much, and I always figured the devs could better 
spend their limited time on higher priority bugs and features.

And given that the sent messages folder is actually a relatively new 
feature as pan features go, for a long time we did without entirely, if 
it wasn't on the server it was simply gone, I was always just glad to 
have a sent messages folder that worked at all, even if I had to restart 
pan to actually read the messages therein.


Meanwhile, the practical aspect is that while Petr, pan's current lead 
dev, does code well enough to manage releases, etc, he's actually a gnome 
translator (thus his gnome access), not a code dev.  We're certainly 
lucky to have him as pan was abandoned for awhile, but he almost entirely 
relies on patch/git-pull-request submissions from others for the changes 
that go into a pan release, and we don't at the current time have a true 
dev actually working on pan, only the various code-literate users and 
distro maintainers submitting patches from time to time.

Which pretty much means, if you're a dev and that itch bothers you enough 
to scratch it and submit a patch, it'll get fixed, but without that, 
filing a bug isn't likely to help much.  The behavior is obvious enough I 
don't think it takes a bug for pan users with coding skills to see it and 
fix it if it bothers them enough, and I just don't see much of a reason 
to file a bug without a patch to fix it.

OTOH, if that's an itch that's bothering you enough to scratch it, and 
you have the skills and time to do so, by all means!  I'm quite sure such 
a patch would be gladly taken!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman