[Pan-devel] Coming April 1: Pan 0.90

[Charles Kerr]

I've kept mum on this for a /long/ time because I didn't know when I'd 
have it ready, but here's a nice April Fool's gift for you... :)

cheers,
Charles
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Pan 0.90 is the first beta of a ground-up rewrite of Pan in C++.

Some of the best user-visible improvements:

* The memory footprint for large newsgroups has been cut by 2/3.
  (A month's worth of headers in a sample binaries group dropped
  from 283M to 94M.)

* The time to download headers has been cut by 2/3 by parallelizing
  the download across multiple conections to the server.  (In the same
  sample group, downloading a months' worth of headers dropped from
  17 minutes to 5 minutes.)

* The time to load large newsgroups from disk has been cut by 90%.
  (In the same sample newsgroup, the time to load from disk
  dropped from 14 seconds to 1.3 seconds.)

* Multiserver support.  Pan can now download files in parallel --
  not just with multiple connections to the same server, but also
  to multiple servers.

* NZB support.  Pan can now import NZB files.  It can also be started
  in an NZB client mode that doesn't create the newsreader window at
  all.

* The entire user interface has been redesigned and rewritten
  to use fresh gtk goodness.


Some of the best backend improvements:

* The source code's line count dropped from 44,382 to 22,281 - and is
  far cleaner.

* Fewer library prerequisites: Pan no longer requires GNet or libxml2.

* Better decoupling has made possible unit tests that were impossible
  before, such as mocking up a news server session to test tasks running
  in the queue.

* The task and application layers are separated from the backend,
  so a database backend can be added later if desired.