Re: [Pan-devel] My list of present problems with Pan.

[Heinrich Müller]

Am Mon, 17 Oct 2011 20:13:48 +0000 schrieb SciFi:

> Hi,
> 
> I should probably post the concerns I'm still having with Pan.  I sent
> this to imhotep82 (Heinrich Müller, before he became judgefudge), and to
> lostcoder (K. Haley) some months ago.  These will likely apply to
> whatever platform I end-up building.  My current Pan build can be seen
> with this post's headers under User-Agent (I'll send judgefudge the
> patches that "enhance" that string, soonish).
> 
> -*-
> 
> 1.
> 
> a)  For Pan's HTML highlighting feature (View->Body_Pane->Highlight
> URLs)
> we need the Tilde character '~' to be accepted as part of the URL
> (sometimes I call this a 'squiggle' <g>).  Presently, Pan is stopping
> the highlighting/copying at just-before this character when it's part of
> the honest-to-goodness URL.  All unix-type servers use this character to
> denote a user's "home folder" no matter how it is structured on that
> server.  We see these kinds of URLs all over the developers lists at
> Gmane and in the world-wide Usenet.  For now, we must do the drag-copy
> of the URL and manually paste it into our browsers.  There are several
> more characters that ought to be acceptable -- look at the way Gmane
> scrambles the URLs and email-addys, such Pan-highlighting does not seem
> to include '+' and '-', either; but don't take this as a sole-missing
> list.  ;)
Done.
> 
> b)  Some other characters are being accepted by Pan's Highlighting code,
> which should *not* be accepted.  For example, when someone uses
> parentheses for the URL such as (http://whatever.com/) , the trailing
> right-parens ')' is being highlighted as if it is part of the URL, and
> being passed to the browser as well (which likely gets a 404).
> (I know this logic could make one go crazy trying to code-around it, but
> that's why we have open URL/URI type libraries, isn't it?  <g>)
> 
> -*-
Done.
> 
> 2.
> 
> Every time I start-up Pan, the Header pane itself is initially "too
> wide" with its scroll-bar opening to the right-side.  In my setup, it's
> the Bytes column's numbers are barely visible, it's been scrolled-off
> the view that far.
> 
> I happen to have turned-off the Score column in the Preferences->Headers
> dialog (that's the only item un-checked there).  I've re-arranged other
> columns so that Bytes is at the bottom (far-right) of the view there. 
> It turns out that this dialog wants to sort the un-checked Score line to
> the bottom of that list, underneath Bytes, no matter what (might be an
> important fact to note here).
> 
> After first starting-up Pan, to make something show-up in the Header
> pane, I must open a newsgroup with articles in it.  Then I can re-adjust
> the Header pane columns (all over again).  I must move the Headers
> horizontal scroller all the way over to the Right, and "tighten-up" the
> Bytes column (move its right-most line over to the left).
> 
> For the rest of the duration running Pan, this will not need any further
> adjustment.
> 
> If I quit Pan, and re-start it later, I must go thru this ordeal all
> over again.
> 
> Something, somewhere, is not saving the re-adjusted value of some
> columns' locations:  If I edit the preferences.xml file before starting
> Pan, and subtract 10 or 20 from the current value of
> 'header-pane-bytes-column-width' there, it seems the next startup will
> behave.  But if I need to quit & restart again, that line in
> preferences.xml is back to its unedited (too-large) value.
> 
> At first I thought the 10 or 20 point changed value was because it isn't
> subtracting the Width of the Headers Vertical Scroller gizmo there -- to
> me, this looks about correct.  But I also notice that the UN-checked
> Scroll column has been shoved over there, too.  So bottom line is I
> don't know what's actually going on here.
> 
> This has occurred so long over the years, no matter what version of OSX
> X11 Xquartz glib gtk+ etc I was running, nor related to the platform
> (both ppc & intel are doing this).
> 
> It's just an irritating lil adjustment I have robotically been doing for
> so long.  ;)  I thought khaley had tackled some kind of adjustment-bug
> in these columns, but I guess it didn't touch this particular one.  ;)
> 
> -*-
Could reproduce it here, but it is _very_ hard to pinpoint where this 
is coming from.
> 
> 3.  Some of the IP-Number Displays still don't show the Port Number,
> mainly in the pop-up "yellow boxes", but in other areas also such as in
> the Posting Profile preferences at "Post Articles via:" drop-down list.
> My explanation:
> I use stunnel going to/from every NNTP server anymore.  All network
> paths in Pan need to be set to '127.0.0.1:<port>' for the corresponding
> entry in my stunnel.conf file.  I had been adding several lines in my
> /etc/hosts file to give various pseudo-hostnames to 127.0.0.1, just so I
> could get Pan to show each choice in a different way.  I don't know why,
> but OSX seems to want to go outside the box, still, to try finding the
> route for those pseudo-hosts, or some crazy related notion (blame Apple
> again for messing-up the standard *ix methods).  So I've gone back to
> entering precisely '127.0.0.1' inside Pan, but now I've lost being able
> to discern which line mean which path thru stunnel.  See?  ;)
> 
> -*-
Should be no problem now that you don't have to use stunnel anymore.
> 
> 4.  I would love to see some visual indicators for some text-formatting
> settings being used.  I need to see whether word-wrap is in effect, for
> the main issue here -- there are posts that don't much give a clue,
> because they would look "ugly" either way.  ;)  Things like that.  I
> would pick the area on the main Pan window to put these
> indicators/selectors, after the various "Match" icons and a
> separator-line thingy.
> 
> -*-
Done.
> 
> 5.  Before accepting a "version 1.0" of Pan, I have written requests
> over the years to have more "multi-threading" incorporated into the
> program.
> 
On it....
> 
> 6.  I'm still having my problem in the GUI when I highlight any text for
> preparation for copy-&-paste operation.  I reported it here to the
> pan-user list some months ago:
> <http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/pan-users/2011-05/msg00019.html>
> and/or archived at Gmane:
> <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.user/12321>
> <news://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.user/12321>
> which include a PNG screengrab to show what I'm talking about.
> This only happens on GTK+ type GUI windows when the text is allowed to
> be marked for copy+paste.  In stark contrast we get regular
> reverse-video'd highlighted bytes on plain-ol' xterm windows.
> But I am not going to worry about it much, now that I've decided to jump
> off this fruity ship.
> FWIW and FYI I do have the XQuartz version 2.7.0b2 installed now
> <http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/ChangeLog>
> compared to say version 2.6.3 with none of these GUI problems as I
> remember <http://xquartz.macosforge.org/trac/wiki/X112.6.3>
> I'm quite sure the basis is in the deep-down GUI libraries updated by
> XQuartz, probably a mis-match between them and the Glib/Gtk+ libs, which
> I haven't updated in over a year (there's tons of stuff to go thru
> there; I'd much rather spend time building a 100% open system and ditch
> this fruit).
> 
> -*-
Well, nevermind, then :p

> Let me show the diff I made based on a couple weeks ago:
> 
> -* begin *-
> --- configure.in_orig 2011-10-02 18:16:34.000000000 -0500
> +++ configure.in      2011-10-22 14:37:19.000000000 -0500
> @@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
> AC_INIT([pan],[0.135],[http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Pan])
> AC_DEFINE(VERSION_MAJOR,0,[Major part of version number])
> AC_DEFINE(VERSION_MINOR,135,[Minor part of version number])
> -AC_DEFINE(VERSION_REVISION,0,[Revision part of version number])
> (...)
Done, too. Mine atm for example is:
> Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (GIT 5600696 
> address@hidden:judgefudge/pan2.git; x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu)

In another thread there was a discussion about letting the user choose quote 
characters.
See prefs (last tab) and _enable_ @ as a quote character and see the paragraph 
below.

@ Description
@ ----------------
@ BUCK, a richly textured and visually stunning film, follows Buck Brannaman 
from his abusive childhood to his phenomenally successful approach to horses. A 
real-life horse-whisperer , he eschews the violence of his upbringing and 
teaches people to communicate with their horses through leadership and 
sensitivity, not punishment. Buck possesses near magical abilities as he 
dramatically transforms horses - and people - with his understanding, 
compassion and respect. A truly American story about an unsung hero and one of 
the most successful documentaries of the year, BUCK is about an ordinary man 
who has made an extraordinary life despite tremendous odds.

@ Format: NTSC
@ DVD Size: 6.63 Gb -- Exact Untouched Copy
@ Runtime (main feature): 88 minutes
@ Type: Color
@ Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
@ Sound (main feature): English DD2.0
@ Subtitles: optional English SDH | Spanish

@ Disc Features
@ ----------------
@ # Trailers.
@ # Deleted Scenes.
@ # Commentary with Filmmakers and Buck Brannaman.

@ Posted in:
@ a.b.dvd.classics

--> Also be sure to check my "tabs" branch. It works, but doesn't handle the 
"hanging" of pan when loading a new group as that must be fixed elsewhere.

I'll fix the other "requests" when I have the time, but for example more 
threading is _really_ needed, the code as it is now is using threads, but only 
_one_ at a time for example for one TaskArticle (i.e. one download). My upload 
code uses multiple "threads" (class instances.)
I'll modify the source so there are multiple downloads and encoder/decoders 
working simultaneously, but this means a little overhaul of pan's inner core.
It can be done, but I'll take some time to test it thoroughly.

Cheers.