A Pan (newsreader) query
 

Currently, downloaded posts to subscribed newsgroups can be saved to a named sub-directory in my ~/Pan_news directory.

The saved entries include all the headers.

Is there any routine for displaying just the saved messages?

felixk

It's been a while since I used a newsgroup client, but I believe Pan was what I had been using before. The default save directory it was using to store the headers was different than where it saved what I chose to download. Somewhere in the settings will be an option for you to choose what location to store the actual files you download.

Does not sound like the Pan newsreader to me.

I have used Pan - on and off - for some 5 years. It has many admirable features and has collected some highly favourable reviews. But its documentation still remains to be written. 5 years ago, the documentation- message was "We are working on it"; 5 years later, the message reads:

"We're working on it. A handful of people have volunteered and we're in the middle of setting up some way to coordinate them. Please let us know if you'd like to contribute to the manual".

Thank you for taking an interest in my problem.

felixk

I tried Pan recently and was quite dismayed to see no documentation. Once again, we see an example of fun work getting done, with the not so fun, but still very important work like documentation, to be left undone.

I'll be calling up the US President to request that no open-source projects can be published without peer-reviewed documentation. I'll reply back when I get a response. :rolleyes:

bg

If there is no documentation then you are right, I wasn't using Pan.

Edit: I just installed Pan on Jolicloud, this is in fact the same newsreader I had been using before. When I select something to download it pops up with the choice of saving to any location I want. There is also an option to select a default location on a per group basis to save any attachments. Pan has its own cache in the ~.pan2 folder where the headers are saved. I'm not sure I understand what you are asking. Using the command line has the same option with the -o switch, which was mentioned in the man page.

My problem relates to the readability of the saved articles, not to their existence.

As mentioned in my original posting, the saved articles contain all headers -i.e. about 20 lines of headers before the "text of interest" starts.

I consider this to be a PITA.

felixk

It's doing this even when you specify a save path? I downloaded a file to test this out and in the folder I saved it to is only one item, the file I downloaded. The headers are all stored in Pan's directory. Are you using the GUI or command line? I haven't tried it from the command line, but if that is how you are doing it I will try it out and see if the same thing happens.

I am using the GUI.

But maybe not the same version of Pan.

My version (supplied by Debian Lenny) is pan 0.132.

The Pan-suggested "group-path" for saved messages is listed as ~/News. I saved the same article to ~/News and to (my newly-created) ~/Pan_news. And here are the results:

[felixk@ ~]$ ls -lt News
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 felixk felixk 2066 2009-12-20 16:00 4b2c8fc4@news.x-privat.org.msg

[felixk@ ~]$ ls -lt Pan_news
total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 felixk felixk 2066 2009-12-20 16:20 4b2c8fc4@news.x-privat.org.msg

Identical file sizes (2066 bytes).

What I need is a <mail|news> reader that can be pointed to directories which contain MH-type mails (and edit the headers before displaying the content).

felixk

Additional follow-up
 

I believe that our observed differences are flagged above.

The man page of pan has the following entry:

--o path, --output=path
Path to save attachments listed in the nzb files

I have never attempted to save attachments to nzb files. I believe these are binary files and I am far too chicken to download binary files from any source other than Debian.

felixk

I just messed around with the Pan included with Slackware, it's version .133, I can't reproduce your scenario. I created a News folder and chose that location as the default to save files in, whenever I download an article or attachment only that file shows up in the folder. It is very odd that it stores the article headers in your folder, on both of my computers, Slackware and the Ubuntu Jolicloud, it stores them in the .cache folder. If you go into the .pan directory there are a few files in there that store preferences for different things, including the global preferences. You could read through them to see if there's anything that stands out as maybe causing the problem. If you are still having problems you can always using the apt remove/purge and then install it again. There are plenty of other news readers available though, I'm sure the Debian repositories have many ready to use.