Re: [Pan-devel] Re: How is development going?

[Ben Bullock]

2008/5/21 Duncan <address@hidden>:
> "Ben Bullock" <address@hidden>
> posted address@hidden,
> excerpted below, on  Wed, 21 May 2008 14:22:42 +0900:
>
>> I've sent a number of bug reports and patches for Pan newsreader and
>> didn't get any reply. Is the project being developed still?
>
> As a matter of fact, I just covered that question in some detail in the
> user group (well, list, but group as seen thru gmane.org, where I use pan
> to participate).
>
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.user/9728

Oh, sorry, I didn't subscribe to that users' list.

> What pan really needs, altho in practice I'm not sure Charles works well
> that way, but anyway... what pan needs is a second developer, perhaps one
> that's a bit more slow and steady, to compliment Charles' very gifted but
> almost manic depressive development pattern.

I'm not suggesting being a second developer, but I've already begun to
hack on my own version
of Pan - essentially a one-man branch of it. Today I removed three
bugs, two of which I'd
reported on the bugzilla.gnome.org.

> I'm more of the slow and
> steady type myself and have often wished... but unfortunately I'm not
> skilled as a real developer, more the sysadmin scripting type of thing.

I don't really understand all of the code yet but I've had a look
through parts of it. More than anything
I wondered why I didn't get any reply after having reported six bugs,
and the last revision seemed to be a fairly long time ago.

> I'm not sure if no one else has had the long term interest, or if Charles
> just doesn't have a personality that works well in a team type effort, or
> what, but there it sits: he's still the primary developer, and pan is
> still being developed, but subject to what has now become a pronounced
> pattern of fits and starts, gung ho for a time, then pause, then gung ho
> again, then pause.  Meanwhile, I've ended up doing what I can anchoring
> the pan lists, my slow and steady style keeping me here year after year,
> even thru the two plus years we thought pan had been abandoned, before
> Charles made public the rewrite he had apparently been working on in
> private over much of that time.

Hmm, OK, Charles Kerr may be fixing the bugs as we write, or
something? That's great. But the list of bugs is rather long.