On 7/26/22 6:04 AM, Duncan wrote:
David Chmelik posted on Thu, 21 Jul 2022 07:21:55 -0000 (UTC) as
excerpted:
If you look at Thunderbird Mail & News, it does some things better than
Pan such as collapsible hierarchies. I use almost 1,000 newsgroups so
it'd be helpful if each (sub)category could be collapsible.
Pan does have a non-obvious feature that you may or may not find useful in
this regard. Certainly I use it here. But it's not exactly what you
asked for...
The general feature is this: Pan uses the PAN_HOME environmental variable
if set, putting its config, data and cache files there (instead of using
the unset-default ~/.pan2 or whatever directory, I don't even know for
sure what the default is it has been so long).
I use that via pan wrapper script, with symlinks from my various chosen
categories (pan.bin, pan.text, pan.test, in my case, but set it up with
the categories and names you want) to the wrapper script, which then sets
the PAN_HOME var appropriately before launching the real pan binary.
For config files that I want to share between instances I then use
symlinks in each instance home dir to the shared location, so I only have
to edit the common instance to have all the configs change.
That does cut down the number and variety of subscribed groups in each
instance, but it also means if you want to run all of them at once you're
multiplying the memory usage (and for long-retention binary groups pan can
already be a memory hog!), and if they're all using the same servers, you
of course have to set the number of connections for each instance so as
not to have the server refusing your additional connections.
But it works great if you tend to focus on one instance at a time, or they
connect to different servers, or at least if you only run one big binary
instance at a time, with the rest lower-resource text instances that you
read and reply to messages with, so you aren't maxing out the connections
on anyway.
Of course it's also great for keeping your "adult" categories separate
from the "kids' time" categories, if that's what you want/need to do.
Just make the "adult" one a script that you have to invoke from the
commandline, maybe after mounting its PAN_HOME using the root password or
something or it errors out, while the "kids" one has a menu entry and/or a
desktop shortcut for it. =:^)
Category collapsibility is a matter of readability/searchability, not
bandwidth nor hiding nor anything similar. I read some alt, bit,
borland, comp, corel, creative, cs, free, geometry, gmane, gnu, gov,
humanities, ibm, info, linux, list, mailing, mysql, net, news,
newsreader, nlo, nntpworld, openwatcom, perl, rec, sci, scinet, soc,
talk, various regional/local groups though usually several/many
categories at once, sometimes skip a few until catch up.
Mozilla/Thunderbird allows collapsing every subcategory so is easy to
search through all fast (though Pan has a search button, not as powerful
as collapsibility for some cases). In Thunderbird I've been able to
look through all interesting areas of Usenet & Gmane and even find many
interesting categories & groups I wouldn't have otherwise searched for
so never have found... which wasn't able to do in Pan. So, if I want to
look through an entire server (or occasionally read) I use Thunderbird.
For most reading and now all posting (after accidentally sending an
email or two to Usenet in earlier decades) I only use Pan.
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