Woo Hoo posted on Fri, 16 Apr 2010 11:37:59 -0700 as excerpted: > This is a newbie question about pan. I'm using pan 0.133 on linux. > > In my headers pane, I have "thread headers" turned on. If I select "show > matching articles," I get something like this: > . Re: cabbages and kings (2) > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: sealing wax > Re: sealing wax > . Re: sealing wax (1) > Re: sealing wax > Re: sealing wax > The "." symbols represent little triangles. If I click on them, I get > replies to that post. > > Is there some way to make pan show me this hierarchy at a higher level? > In other words, I want to be able to "zoom out" so that what I see is > this: > . Re: cabbages and kings > . Re: sealing wax > Otherwise I find it very difficult to see what's going on in a busy > newsgroup. If there are 10 threads running at once, and each one is > listed in the GUI with 50 different lines, then I have 500 lines in my > header pane that I have to scroll through. I also can't see the nesting > of the hierarchy. Is there any way to get it to display a tree structure > of some kind, like this? > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: cabbages and kings > Re: cabbages and kings
Pan does two types of message nesting, depending on the type of post. First, it does conventional threading, using the references header, which lists message IDs in the "upline". These will show the little expander triangles for replies according to the references header. However, if a common parent post isn't shown, either because it has already expired, or because show only unread messages is set and the message was read in a previous session, or due to defective news clients that mangled beyond help the references header or eliminated it entirely (unfortunately, there are clients that do that, destroying the threading), there's no common ancestor to thread the messages under, so they show up as separate threads. If the problem is simply due to showing only unread messages, you can of course switch to showing all messages, thereby showing the previously read thread parents and providing the upline messages for all the children to be threaded under. If the messages are simply not there, however, due either to jumping in in the middle of the thread, when they'd already expired off the server and thus were never downloaded, or to too fast expiry set for pan locally, or because some client is mangling the references header, that obviously won't work. Pan does not implement the by-subject "pseudo-threading" that some clients have, because just because the subject is the same doesn't mean it's the same thread. Pan always uses the references header, so if it's incorrect, well... One way around this is to use either sort by subject, so you can scroll thru entire subjects at a time as they're at least grouped. OR use the message search feature, thus hiding all messages not matching the current search. The second type of message nesting, really combining in this case, that pan does, is for multipart binaries. For these messages, pan combines all the parts that form a single message into one, for display and memory efficiency purposes. Typically, a DVD or CD ISO will be manually split into several parts pre-posting, then each of those parts will be automatically split by the client when posting, to keep individual messages below a certain size or line-count. Sometimes, a distinction may be made between the automatic and manually split message parts by calling one or the other segments, as opposed to parts, but the usage there isn't consistent enough to be sure that segments always refers to one or the other, so despite the fact that what I'm calling "manual" splitting can be done automatically as well, I'm using the automatic/manual terminology here, since the lowest level is almost always an automatic split, while the higher level split is indeed often (tho not always) handled manually. Anyway, pan combines the automatic splits back into one for display. The manual splits are, to the client, separate posts appearing as part of a series, and pan maintains them that way. However, in some groups this can reduce the message-count by two orders of magnitude, so the savings in both display space and memory can be substantial. But this sort of message combining appears as just that -- pan displays it as a single message, on a single line, no expanders. -- 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 _______________________________________________ Pan-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/pan-users
