Pan, a newsreader for GNOME.  

 

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    Old News

    June 7, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.94 "We pass through this world but once"

      This is the fifth beta of 0.12.0, which began life as a gtk2 port of Pan 0.11.3, grew some new features and usability improvments, and is now (hopefully) shaking out any final bugs before 0.12.0.

      Updates
    • Small UI improvments for copying articles to folders (#64867), watching/ignoring articles (#78006), the `next article' button (#82724), and reading a group for the first time (#82092).
    • Some good speed improvements in decoding, threading, and sorting.

      Bug Fixes
    • Check that the article's charset is valid for the body. If not, warn the user and propose a better charset. Thanks to Frank Van Damme for reporting this. (#83045)
    • Fixed 0.11.91 bug that caused the header pane to get switched to the body pane when an article was cleared, such as when deleting an article or switching groups. Thanks to Sam Solon for reporting this bug and providing a patch.
    • Fixed long-standing bug that could cause Pan to crash when deleting articles which had crossposts in a group that was being unloaded by Pan. Thanks to bickingd for reporting this bug. (#82865)
    • Fixed long-standing bug that could cause Pan to crash when adding new tasks while the task manager dialog was open. Thanks to Thomas Gamble for reporting this bug. (#82262)
    • Fixed minor bug that could give the wrong error message for articles that users tried to post without a Subject header. (#82828)
    • Fixed long-standing bug that could cause Pan to crash if the grouplist file was corrupt. Thanks to Adam M for reporting this bug. (#72435)

    May 21, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.93 "Milo Conducts the Dawn"

      This is the fourth beta of 0.12.0, which began life as a gtk2 port of Pan 0.11.3, but has sprouted new features and usability improvements along the way.

      New Features
    • Added support for message/partial mime content headers. Thanks to T. Gamble for requesting this. (#80715)

      Updates
    • Tweak to `space reading': if a user selects an article without reading it, pressing the space key will then display that selected article. Likewise if a group selection changes, pressing the space key will jump to the selected group. Thanks to William Wu for reporting issues that led to this feature. (#81868)
    • Some menu cleanups: `space reading' is back in; a shortcut for `delete last task' has been added, and the menus are now compliant with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.
    • Decoding attachments takes less memory and much less disk space.
    • Minor speed improvements in startup and article reading.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed 0.11.91 bug that made tabbed-mode reading difficult to use. Thanks to Roman Moeller for reporting this bug. (#81726)
    • Fixed 0.11.90 problem that caused the text pane to scroll to the bottom of long articles when reading them in 'zoom' mode. Thanks to Kang Jeong Hee for reporting this bug. (#76110)
    • Fixed 0.11.90 bug that made the article pane not take the users' color preferences seriously. (#80739)
    • Fixed a couple of minor 0.11.3 memory leaks.
    • Fixed long-standing article-cache-never-shrinks bug. Thanks to Bernard Debreil for reporting this bug. (#81464)

    May 8, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.92 "Egbert B. Gebstadter"

      This is the third beta of 0.12.0, which is a port of Pan to gtk2. The port adds an easier user interface, better charset/internationalization support, fewer library dependencies than 0.11.3, and bugfixes.

      New Features
    • Added menu button "File|Work Offline" for working offline.
    • Added menu button "File|Delete Last Task"; ie, the "oops" button :)
    • Pan's window title now indicated how many articles are selected. This makes life easier when checking to see if all the parts of a rar post are present. (#79338)
    • Pan now puts the architecture in the User Agent header. Thanks to Colin Leroy for contributing this code. (#81029)

      Updates
    • More keyboard navigation and menu simplification cleanups.
    • Slightly faster deleting articles and marking articles read.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed 0.11.91 cut-and-paste bug that could cause article bodies to be saved in the wrong location. Thanks to Colin Leroy for reporting this bug. (#75591)
    • Fixed 0.11.91 bug that caused threads sometimes not to be expanded. Thanks to Frank Van Damme for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed some 0.11.91 menu typos reported by Marcel Telka.
    • Fixed two 0.11.90 bug in `User Profiles' Tool which kept new profiles from being saved.
    • Fixed two 0.11.90 bug in `User Profiles' Tool which kept users from being able to edit their profile's custom headers.
    • Fixed 0.11.90 bug that could add garbage to the signature of a posted message.
    • Fixed 0.11.2.90 bug that failed to deccode yEnc-encoded text messages (such as .nfo files) properly when the user tried to read them inside Pan's text pane. Thanks to William McBrine for reporting this bug. (#75136)
    • Fixed long-standing bug that didn't create user-specified directories when saving article bodies via "Save As...". Thanks to Colin Leroy for reporting this bug and submitting a patch. (#80292)
    • Fixed long-standing bug that didn't properly thread articles that had the subject header idiom "track (n/M] part (x/y)". Thanks to gaw zay for reporting this bug. (#80901)
    • Fixed lond-standing bug that caused Pan to segfault on shutdown when it could not write the threads.txt file in the data directory. (#81080)

    April 26, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.91 "Brutus Cyclops Dull"

      This is the second beta of 0.12.0, which is a port of Pan 0.11.3 to gtk2. The port adds better charset/internationalization support, fewer library dependencies than 0.11.3, usability improvements, and bugfixes.

      New Features
    • Added a user-configurable per-group default charset to use when converting messages that don't specify their own charset. In 0.11.90 Pan didn't know how to convert messages that didn't specify a charset and just left the message blank. Thanks for Frank Van Damme for reporting this. (#79275)
    • Added new preferences option to get new headers from subscribed groups automatically when starting Pan.

      Updates
    • Call bind_textdomain_codeset() when starting Pan to set the output codeset for message translations. Thanks to Kang JeongHee for suggesting this. (#78158)
    • Refined `rot13 article body' to `rot13 selected text', since most rot13ed text is just punchlines or a spoiler paragraph, rather than an entire body. Thanks to jim at cosx for suggesting this. (#72015)
    • Added `%g' and `%G' substitution fields into the download directory path. If used these will be replaced with the.group.name/ and the/group/name/ when saving articles. Thanks to Hans Verkuil for this suggestion. (#75591)

      Bug Fixes
    • The single-keystroke hotkeys (like 'n' for next article), which disappeared in 0.11.90, are back! (#75478, #78528)
    • Fixed major memory leak in 0.11.90 that didn't free pictures that were read inline.
    • Fix bug that kept 0.11.90 from compiling on platforms that can't take a NULL in a function expecting a va_list. Thanks to chaton.jm for reporting this bug. (#78112)
    • Fixed 0.11.90 bug that didn't clear out the previous contents of the compose window before adding the contents from the external editor. Thanks to Kang JeongHee for suggesting this. (#74885)
    • Fixed 0.11.90 bug that caused filtering on new/unread/old to not work properly. Thanks to Philip Langdale for reporting this bug. (#79669)
    • Fixed 0.11.90 bug that didn't convert text to UTF-8 before displaying it in the Task Manager window. Thanks to Kang Jeong-Hee for reporting this bug. (#80004)
    • Synchronize with 0.11.3 bugfixes that were made after 0.11.90. (#62909) (#73179) (#78287)
    • Fixed 0.11.2 bug that didn't show HTML messages. We still don't parse the HTML -- HTML has no place in Usenet -- but we at least show the message now. Thanks to Himanshu J. Gohel for reporting this bug. (#78723)
    • If an article was selected (for, say, a context menu operation), then clicking on the same article again wouldn't download & display the article; you had to double-click, which was nonintuitive. Now clicking on an already-selected article will download & display the article. Thanks to Dan Hensley for reporting this bug. (#78557)
    • Other miscellaneous changes. (#79377) (#69390)

     

    April 19, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.3 "Wenn ist das Nunstuck git und Slotermeyer?"

      This is mostly a stability release. It fixes about twenty-five bugs that were present in 0.11.2, and adds a few new features, notably yEnc support.

      Changes Since 0.11.2:

      New Features
    • Added support for decoding yenc attachments! Thanks to Gabi Davar and Jeff Stedfast for helping to code and debug this. (70368, 71330)
    • Added the ability to choose which characters are recognized as quote prefix characters, so nonconformists not using '<' to quote text will still have their articles colored right in Pan. :) Thanks to Colin Leroy for this code. (68159, 75916)
    • Added "Go to previous read article" button. Thanks to Colin Leroy for this code. (75716)

      Updates
    • The 'Download Articles' dialog now activates the group after its headers are downloaded. This dialog is usually for sampling a group, so this seems the more intuitive approach. Thanks to Himanshu J. Gohel for suggesting this. (66510)
    • Added Message-ID to Find Article's search options. Thanks to Pascal Valois for suggesting this. (68332)
    • Added a preference option for failed tasks to be automatically removed from the Task Manager. Thanks to John Mellow and Aric S. Campling for suggesting this. (71992, 75186)
    • Added support for articles which specify a Content-Transfer-Encoding of "x-uuencode". Thanks to Sam Solon and Jeff Stedfast for this code. (74798)
    • Ensure that the default compose window size can fit a full line in the default font without scrolling. Thanks to John Mellor for suggesting this. (76062)
    • Respect incorrect Followup-To: headers containing email addresses, Thanks to Mike Brodbelt for suggesting this. (72608)

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed bug that caused multi-part binary posts with subjects like (3/28) instead of (03/28) to be seen as incomplete. Thanks to Craig Orsinger for reporting this. (71647)
    • Fixed 0.11.2 bug where the `Your post has mumble problems; post anyway?' dialog could crash Pan. (71440)
    • Fixed 0.11.2 bug where emptying a group didn't always zero out the article count. Thanks to Craig Orgsinger for reporting this. (71645)
    • Fixed crash that occurred constantly in the Japanese locale. Thanks to Erik Anderson and Bill Huang for reporting this bug, and to T. Aihana for fixing the Japanese translation file. (78244)
    • Fixed long-standing bug that made it impossible to cancel an unread article. Thanks to Kerstin Rohlfs for reporting this. (64287)
    • Fixed UI bug in the message composer that caused Ctrl-space to act as "send now". (71352)
    • When editing an existing server profile, the server name is now read-only. Thanks to Ned Boddy for reporting this bug. (72432)
    • Fixed UI bug in the Preferences dialog that caused the OK button to stay greyed out even when some parts of the dialog had changed. Thanks to John Mellor for reporting this. (73180)
    • The Profile Editor now rejects double-quotes in the author's real name. Thanks to Martin Bruchanov for reporting this. (68770)
    • Fixed a crash that occurred when sending mail from a system that didn't have a resolvable hostname. Thanks to T'aZ for reporting this bug. (74129)
    • Fixed a crash that occurred sometimes when Pan couldn't connect to the news server. Thanks to Aurelien Gouny for reporting this bug. (70858)
    • Fixed a bug in the compose window that caused some new text typed in by the user to be colored in the quoted-text color rather than the normal text color. Thanks to Michael McIntyre for reporting this bug. (75993)
    • If a yenc block ends without a "yend" or a uu block ends without an "end", treat the block as plaintext instead of encoded data. Looks like some M$ bashers are starting their posts with "begin 666" to tickle a similar bug in OE. :) Thanks to Jason Rumney and mr_p for reporting this bug. (76358)
    • Fixed crash that occurred when trying to parse empty/corrupt messages. Thanks to Jorge Salinas for reporting this bug. (78287)
    • Fixed bug that could incorrectly cause articles to become marked as read. Thanks to Jiri Kubicek for tracking this down and writing a fix. (77878)
    • Fixed crash that occurred when the user tried to create a new identity that was incomplete. Thanks to Jef E. for reporting this bug. (77582)
    • Pan now uses GMT rather than local time when generating the timestamp for unique message ids of new posts. When using local time and daylight savins ends, a date could show up twice. Thanks to Mirko Liss for suggesting this. (77528)
    • Increased the default maximum number of connections for new servers to two, since we also default to reserving one connection for reading messages. Thanks to William Peterson for reporting this. (76867)
    • Fixed bug that was too strict on what Message-IDs to retain in a References: header when posting a follow-up. Thanks to Colin Leroy and Jim Henderson for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.11.1 branefart that moved widget focus to the thread pane, rather than the text pane, whenever a message was read via the 'N' key. Thanks to Florian Schmidt for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed some potential connection problems. Thanks to Sven Neuhaus for reporting these issues. (73179)
    • The Filter Text in the Edit Rule dialog box now has a scrollbar when required. Thanks to Himanshu J. Gohel for reporting this. (62909)
    • Fixed various memory leaks.

    April 8, 2002 - 0.12.0 on Windows

      There's still at least a week or two of work before this version of Pan is ready, but even getting to where I could screenshot this is a big milestone. :)

    March 20, 2002 - Status Update:
    Pan 0.12.0 Status and Screenshot

      0.12.0 is the gtk+ 2.0 port of Pan which is being developed in parallel with 0.11.3, which is a bugfix release. All of 0.11.3's bugfixes are folded into 0.12, but it adds some neat new graphics and finally adds support for posting and reading non-Latin charset languages.

      0.12.0 is coming along quickly and will have a public beta in early April. Here's a screenshot taken earlier today to show off the new i18n support.

    March 14, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.2.90 "Reverse the Polarity of the Neutron Flow"

      This version adds support for the yEnc encoding scheme. We've also incorporated a number of usability suggestions, along with a handful of bug fixes.

      New Features
    • Added support for decoding yenc-encoded attachments! Thanks to Gabi Davar and Jeff Stedfast for contributing code and debugging to this effort. (70368, 71330)

      Updates
    • The 'Download Articles' dialog now switches the articlelist to the group when the headers have been downloaded. Since this dialog is mostly used to sample a (potentially large) group, this seems the more intuitive approach. Thanks to Himanshu J. Gohel for suggesting this. (66510)
    • Added Message-ID to Find Article's search criteria. Thanks to Pascal Valois for suggesting this. (68332)
    • If an article no longer exists on the news server, tasks to read that article are now automatically removed from the Task Manager. Thanks to John Mellor for reporting this. (71992)

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed bug that caused multi-part binary posts with variable-length segment number to be seen as incomplete. Thanks to Craig Orsinger for reporting this. (71647)
    • Fixed 0.11.2 bug where Pan could crash when a confirmation dialog was needed to confirm sending a message with issues. (71440)
    • Fixed 0.11.2 bug that could cause the article count not to be reset to zero when the group was empties. Thanks to Craig Orgsinger for reporting this. (71645)
    • Fixed long-standing bug that made it impossible to cancel an unread message. Thanks to Kerstin Rohlfs for leading me to this bug. (64287)
    • Fixed UI bug in the message composer that caused Ctrl-space to send the message. (71352)
    • When editing an existing server profile, the server name is now read-only. Thanks to Ned Boddy for reporting this bug. (72432)
    • Better handling for the case where the 'Followup-To:' header contains an email address. Thanks to Mike Brodbelt for suggesting this. (72608)
    • Fixed UI bug in the Preferences that caused the button not to activate when directly various fields. Thanks to John Mellor for reporting this. (73180)
    • The Profile Editor now rejects double-quotes in the author's real name. Thanks to Martin Bruchanov for reporting this. (68770)
    • Fixed a crash when occurred when sending mail from a system that didn't have a resolvable hostname. Thanks to T'aZ for reporting this bug. (74129)
    • Fixed various memory leaks.

    Newsreader as Best Web Tool? :)
    Vote for Pan! (No registration; it takes 30 seconds.)

      Linuxformat magazine has nominated Pan for the "Best Web Software" category in their 2001 awards. Pan is the dark horse -- it's up against four web browsers -- but we're tickled by the of a Usenet client beating out the web browsers for Best-of-Web. Go vote for Pan!

    February 7, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.2 "Ansluter till den svenska konspirationen"

      Over thirty bugs have been fixed in the stable branch since 0.11.1. During that time there were also five betas to weed out any new bugs. In addition 0.11.2 is also faster, uses less memory, and adds many small improvements to the user interface.

      Changes Since 0.11.1:

      New Features
    • The thread pane now looks like many GUI mail clients in that it boldfaces articles with new replies and greys out read articles to show which articles are new, unread, and old. Also, when a thread is collapsed, the subject column will tell how many new replies are in the collapsed thread. Thanks to Jed Baer, Douglas Bollinger, and Andreas Ollinger for working these ideas through to consensus on the pan-users mailing list.
    • Added support for Microsoft Secure Password Authentication ("SPA") so that Pan will work with Microsoft NNTP servers. Thanks to the Samba team for writing the SPA authentication code and to Marc Prud'hommeaux for plugging it into Pan!
    • Added the ability to specify, on a per-Profile basis, the domain name to be used in the Message-Id header in new posts. This can be used to point to your proper domain or just for privacy's sake.
    • Added the option to have all threads expanded by default. Thanks to Bas Mevissen for submitting a patch for this feature.
    • Pan now has a Greek translation! Thanks to Simos Xenitellis for contributing this.

      Updates
    • The Preferences and Filter Editor dialogs now fit on 800x600 screens.
    • We now support POSIX extended regular expression syntax, giving us support for operators like '?'. Thanks to Chris Petersen for suggesting this.
    • Better error reporting on disk I/O errors (full disk, permissions errors, etc.)
    • Slightly faster download and display of articles.
    • The ``Directory'' field in the ``Save As'' dialog now handles ~ correctly as shorthand for the users' home directory.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed huge 0.11.1 memory leak.
    • Fixed crash that could sometimes occur when cancelling tasks or going offline from the Task Manager.
    • Fixed crash when overriding the system defaults for article foreground and background colors. This crash seems to be related to specific GTK themes. Thanks to T'Az and Krishna Naik for reporting this problem.
    • Fixed crash that occurred when incomplete identities were entered in the Profile Editor. Incomplete profiles can no longer be entered. Thanks to nhodge1 for reporting this bug. (67311)
    • Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when an invalid rules xml file was read. Thanks to Roger Gregory for reporting this bug. (67657)
    • Fixed crash that seemed to happen for no reason when reading new articles.
    • Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when reading an article.
    • Fixed thread safety bug in the article cache.
    • Fixed thread safety bug in the Task Manager backend. Thanks very much to Christian Suder for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.10.0.93 bug that caused a GUI lockup under arcane circumstances when reading articles.
    • Fixed a couple of long-standing GUI thread bugs that could corrupt data or lock up Pan.
    • Fixed bug that caused some attachments to be decoded incorrectly. Thanks to Dave at dalrun for reporting this bug.
    • Fix the "group->_article == NULL" assertion failure when loading a group.
    • Fixed bug that improperly hid new replies that were in collapsed threads. The top-level articles should have been showed in boldface to indicate that the thread had new replies.
    • Fixed bug that caused the first group to be loaded during a Pan session to not be filtered properly. Thanks to Douglas Bollinger, Dan Hensley, and others for reporting this.
    • Double-clicking a URL would open up to three browsers if the browser wasn't already running. Thanks to Mart van de Wege for reporting this. (68009)
    • Fixed bug that accidentally downloaded a couple of old articles in the "Get New Headers" command.
    • If Followup-To is set to 'poster', only send the article as an email. Thanks to Christian Lohmaier for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed mistake in 0.11.1 that used "supercede" instead of "supersede" when superseding articles.
    • Fixed bug in importing grouplists from Pan version 0.9.6 and older. Thanks to Brandon McCombs for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed bug that made it appear that, when retrying a download after the first try failed or the user went offline, all the articles in the task needed to be re-downloaded. Pan no longer looks like it's re-downloading articles it already has.
    • Fixed gmime build errors that occurred on platforms that need to include alloca.h. Thanks to Alan Young for reporting this.
    • Fixed 0.10.0.93 bug that caused crossposts to not be marked as read when a single article or entire group is marked as read.
    • Fixed 0.10.0.93 memory leak that didn't free all article information on duplicate or user-deleted articles.
    • Fixed long-standing bug that required two left-clicks, rather than the typical one left-click, to pop down the context menu in the article pane. Thanks to Devin Carraway for reporting this bug. (69170)
    • Fixed a long-standing NNTP server connection corruption bug.
    • Now handles '~' in the TMPDIR environmental variable. Thanks to Jukka Salmi for suggesting this change.

    February 1, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.1.94 "Between Empire State Building and
    Between Trafalgar Square"

      This bugfix release corrects a handful nasty of gui lockups, crashes, and deadlocks.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed 0.10.0.93 bug that caused a GUI lockup under arcane circumstances when reading articles.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.92 bug that caused Pan to crash when emptying a group which had an article displayed in the text pane. Thanks to Jean Ribiere for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.92 bug that caused a GUI lockup under other arcane circumstances. Thanks to Torbjorn Olofsson for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.92 bug that caused the first article read to not be displayed if the user started up Pan in zoom mode. Thanks to Stefan Van Theemsche and Douglas Bollinger for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed several other 0.11.1.93 deadlock issues. Thanks to Gabi Davar for reporting some of these.
    • Now handles '~' in the TMPDIR environmental variable. Thanks to Jukka Salmi for suggesting this change.

    January 28, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.1.93 "Fire and Motion"

      This is a small release that fixes a couple of 0.11.1.92 bugs and a couple of long-standing ones.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed a long-standing NNTP server connection corruption bug.
    • Fixed a couple of long-standing GUI thread bugs.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.92 bug that caused cached articles to not be marked as read when the user read them. Thanks to Tõivo Leedjärv and Adrian von Bidder for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.92 bug that made the "Edit Filter" dialog too wide to fit even on large screens.

    January 20, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.1.92 "Joshu's Dog"

      This version has a handful of important crash fixes and plugged memory leaks. It also adds an option to expand all threads by default when entering a newsgroup.

      New Features
    • Added the option to have all threads expanded by default. Thanks to Bas Mevissen for submitting a patch for this feature.

      Updates
    • The "Directory" field in the "Save As" dialog now handles ~ correctly as shorthand for the users' home directory.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed 0.11.1.91 gui lockup bug. Thanks to Douglas Bollinger for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.90 bug that caused Pan to crash sometimes when reading or decoding articles.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.90 bug that caused pan to crash on a SIGPIPE signal when a news server connection closed unexpectedly. Thanks to Alen Williams for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.11.1.90 bug that caused Pan to not authenticate properly on at least one older NNTP server. Thanks to Avtar Marwaha for reporting this bug and to Marc Prud'hommeaux for providing this patch.
    • Fixed 0.10.0.93 bug that caused crossposts to not be marked as read when a single article or entire group is marked as read.
    • Fixed 0.10.0.93 memory leak that didn't free all article information on duplicate or user-deleted articles.
    • Fixed long-standing bug that required two left-clicks, rather than the typical one left-click, to pop down the context menu in the article pane. Thanks to Devin Carraway for reporting this bug. (#69170)

    January 15, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.1.91 "No, Lamb Dear, Give Panther the Narky Poon"

      This version fixes a couple of crashes, a bug that made it hard to find new articles without expanding all the threads, and a couple of build errors reported against the last beta.

      Updates
    • Slightly faster download and display of articles.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when reading an article.
    • Fix the "group->_article == NULL" assertion failure when loading a group.
    • Fixed bug that made it appear that, when retrying a download after the first try failed or the user went offline, all the articles in the task needed to be re-downloaded. Pan no longer looks like it's re-downloading articles it already has.
    • Fixed bug that improperly hid new replies that were in collapsed threads. The top-level articles should have been showed in boldface to indicate that the thread had new replies.
    • Fixed gmime build errors that occurred on platforms that need to include alloca.h. Thanks to Alan Young for reporting this.
    • Fixed bug that caused the first group to be loaded during a Pan session to not be filtered properly. Thanks to Douglas Bollinger, Dan Hensley, and others for reporting this.

    January 7, 2002 - New Release:
    0.11.1.90 "Rommelspargel"

      This version adds easier visual cues for new/unread/old articles, support for Microsoft "SPA" authentication, some speed tweaks, dialogs that are friendly to 800x600 screens, a fix for a very big memory leak, and a handful of other important bug fixes.

      New Features
    • The thread pane now looks like many GUI mail clients in that it boldfaces articles with new replies and greys out read articles to show which articles are new, unread, and old. Also, when a thread is collapsed, the subject column will tell how many new replies are in the collapsed thread. Thanks to Jed Baer, Douglas Bollinger, and Andreas Ollinger for working these ideas through to consensus on the pan-users mailing list.
    • Added support for Microsoft Secure Password Authentication ("SPA") so that Pan will work with Microsoft NNTP servers. Thanks to the Samba team for writing the SPA authentication code and to Marc Prud'hommeaux for plugging it into Pan!
    • Pan now has a Greek translation! Thanks to Simos Xenitellis for contributing this.
    • Added the ability to specify, on a per-Profile basis, the domain name to be used in the Message-Id header in new posts. This can be used to point to your proper domain or just for privacy's sake.
    • Added new regression tests to the testing module.

      Updates
    • The Preferences Dialog now fits on an 800x600 screen and has other UI improvements.
    • Better error reporting on disk I/O errors (full disk, permissions errors, etc.)
    • About two dozen small speed tweaks.
    • We now support POSIX extended regular expression syntax, giving us support for operators like '?'. Thanks to Chris Petersen for suggesting this.

      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed huge 0.11.1 memory leak.
    • Fixed bug that caused some attachments to be decoded incorrectly. Thanks to Dave at dalrun for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed crash that seemed to happen for no reason when reading new articles.
    • Fixed thread safety bug in the article cache.
    • Fixed thread safety bug in the Task Manager backend. Thanks very much to Christian Suder for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed crash that could sometimes occur when cancelling tasks or going offline from the Task Manager.
    • Fixed crash when overriding the system defaults for article foreground and background colors. This crash seems to be related to specific GTK themes. Thanks to T'Az and Krishna Naik for reporting this problem.
    • Fixed crash that occurred when incomplete identities were entered in the Profile Editor. Incomplete profiles can no longer be entered. Thanks to nhodge1 for reporting this bug. (67311)
    • Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when an invalid rules xml file was read. Thanks to Roger Gregory for reporting this bug. (67657)
    • Double-clicking a URL would open up to three browsers if the browser wasn't already running. Note: URLs only need a single click. Thanks to Mart van de Wege for reporting this. (68009)
    • Fixed bug that accidentally downloaded a couple of old articles in the "Get New Headers" command.
    • If Followup-To is set to 'poster', only send the article as an email. Thanks to Christian Lohmaier for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed mistake in 0.11.1 that used "supercede" instead of "supersede" when superseding articles.
    • Fixed bug in importing grouplists from Pan version 0.9.6 and older. Thanks to Brandon McCombs for reporting this bug.

    December 5, 2001 - New Release:
    0.11.1 "Where are the Snowdens of Yesteryear?"

      About thirty bugs have been fixed during the three betas since 0.11.0's release. 0.11.1 also has some obligatory memory/speed tweaks and -- just in case we missed more bugs -- better crash recovery :)

      New Features
    • New builtin filter: "Threads I've Posted In"
    • The header pane now allows filtering by Message-ID
    • Better guessing of default the default news server for new users with cable modems.
    • In the header pane, the left/right arrow keys now collapse/expand the currently-selected threads. Thanks to Chris Petersen for suggesting this.
      Updates
    • Better data recovery in the case of a Pan or system crash.
    • Better error-checking, handling, and writing-to-the-Pan-log when saving/decoding articles and when saving the local cache files.
    • Slightly faster downloading and threading of articles.
    • New Simplified Chinese translation by Zipeco <zipeco@btamail.net.cn>
    • New Portuguese translation by Duarte Loreto .
      Configuration
    • Mac OS X build fixes. Thanks to Max Horn for reporting these and providing patches.
    • Build fixes for the Compaq C compiler on Linux Alpha. Thanks to Alan Young for reporting these problems and submitting a patch.
    • Fixed small compile problem with "pan.sendlater" being defined in the wrong library. Thanks to Gabi Davar and Francesco Lamonica for reporting this bug.
      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash on startup if the newsrc file exists, but Pan is unable to read this (e.g. permissions). Thanks to Joris Lambrecht and about a million other people for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed 0.11.0 that caused some attachments to be decoded incorrectly. Thanks to Thomas Gamble for finding this bug and providing a fix.
    • Fixed crash that occurred when repeatedly loading the same group.
    • Significant memory leak when saving articles fixed. Thanks to Rick for noticing this and tracking own the problem.
    • Fixed 0.11.0 bug that, when an empty group was activated, Pan would go to the server twice for new headers instead of once. In addition to pointless load, if you were really unlucky there would be one or two new articles in the second load, marking the ones from the first run and leaving you scratching your head "how did I just download a batch of old articles from a new group?" :)
    • Fixes freeze & integrity bugs in the Task Manager. Thanks to Alex Flinsch, Alan Young, Gabi Davar, and Jed Baer for helping to track down some of these problems.
    • Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash or not be able to post articles under certain conditions.
    • Fixed bug that caused the CPU to sometimes peg at 100% when the user hit the "empty group" button.
    • Fixed rare crash-on-exit bug that occurred when one thread was shutting down the Pan app log while another thread was trying to log a shutdown message. :) Thanks to Jed Baer for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed rare gui lockup bug when loading new articles for the group that's currently loaded.
    • "Flag Thread" and "Unflag Thread" didn't flag the entire thread as they should have. Thanks to Peter Borgmann for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed bug that kept the "supercede article" feature from working properly.
    • Fixed integrity bug in filtering on complete/incomplete multiparts.
    • Fixed bug that caused article bodies to be saved improperly when the user specified the filename from the save dialog. Thanks to Andreas Ollinger for reporting this bug and to Joseph Turian for providing a patch.
    • Fixed bug that caused non-visible filters to reappear on the filter menu when Pan was restarted. Thanks to Douglas Bollinger for reporting this bug.
    • The Article cache was growing past the user-defined limit in 0.11.0. Thanks to Muralito and Alan Young for reporting this bug.
    • Now handles watching/ignoring a thread even if the article selected when 'watch' button is pressed has a broken References: header. (Shame on you Forte Agent 1.8! :) Thanks to David Watson for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed bug that didn't remember the "Thread/Unthread Header Pane" setting between sessions and required the button to be pressed twice before it would work. Thanks to Jed Baer for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed bug that incorrectly saved the pane dimensions for the "three vertically stacked panes" layout mode. Thanks to Douglas Bollinger and Erik W. Hanson for reporting this bug.
    • Small memory leaks fixed.

    December 4, 2001 - Pan on Mac OS X

      Max Horn of the Fink project project has fed some patches back into Pan to get it working with Fink's software packager for Mac OS X. Installing Pan on Mac OS X is now a one-liner!

      Here at ChimPanXi we love it when people do work for us for free, so hats off to Max and the whole Fink team!

      The obligatory screenshot:

    November 26, 2001 - New Release:
    0.11.0.92 "Cherry Blossoms Fall"

      Features stay, unchanged
      While bugs fade into the mist
      Cherry blossoms fall.
      Updates
    • Now also saving the group's 'Which Articles to Show' filter setting. Thanks to Uli Wachowitz for suggesting this feature.
    • Slightly faster downloading of article headers.
      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash on startup if the newsrc file exists, but Pan is unable to read this (e.g. permissions). Thanks to Joris Lambrecht for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed bug that caused the CPU to peg at 100% when the user hit the "empty group" button.
    • Fixed bug that could interfere with posting new articles.
    • Fixed bug that caused filtering on complete/incomplete multiparts to be inaccurate.
    • Fixed bug that caused non-visible filters to reappear on the filter menu when Pan was restarted. Thanks to Douglas Bollinger for reporting this bug.
    • Mac OS X build fixes. Thanks to Max Horn for reporting these and providing patches.

    November 20, 2001 - New Release:
    0.11.0.91 "Alethiometer"

      This is a bugfix release which adds no new features.
      Updates
    • Better error-checking, handling, and writing-to-the-Pan-log when the group header cache can't be saved.
    • Better data recovery in the case of a Pan or system crash.
      Bug Fixes
    • Significant memory leak when saving articles fixed. Thanks to Rick for noticing this and tracking own the problem.
    • Fixed bug that caused article bodies to be saved improperly when the user specified the filename from the save dialog. Thanks to Andreas Ollinger for reporting this bug and to Joseph Turian for providing a patch.
    • Fixed bug that caused tasks to get stuck in the task manager. Thanks to Alex V Flinsch, Alan Young and Gabi Davar for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed awful bug that caused the server header cache directory to not be created, which caused new users to not be able to read articles in 0.11.0.90. D'oh!
    • Fixed 0.11.0 bug that, when an empty group was activated, Pan would go to the server twice for new headers instead of once. In addition to the pointless net traffic, if you were really unlucky there would be one or two new articles in the second load, marking the ones from the first run and leaving you scratching your head "how did I just download a batch of old articles from a new group?" :)

    November 15, 2001 - Handheld Pan!

      ChimPanXi Vice President Felicity Lumpkins demonstrated the Palm Pilot port of Pan, code-named "Paln", to members of the tech press today. Paln 1.0 -- the first Palm-held Usenet client -- will be released shortly before Christmas and will sell for $79.99 for a single-user license.

      "This takes instant messenging to a global level," said Ms. Lumpkins. Usenet is the killer app of the handheld world, and we're proud to be the first-to-market in this space."

      Ms. Lumpkins cast this as new direction for the Usenet software company. "These hard times will be a bad memory a year from now. It will be the norm to globally share messages, news, pictures, and even movies on Palm Pilots via Usenet and Paln. And as Paln leads the industry to global interconnectedness, it will lead ChimPanXi to profitability. Paln is our Pal!"

    November 14, 2001 - New Release:
    0.11.0.90 "Tiddely pom"

      This release has a new filter "Threads I've Posted In" and some minor user interface improvements. However most of the work has gone into bugfixes as we try to move from "sexy, new 0.11.0 release" to "stable, boring 0.11.x release".
      New Features
    • Added new builtin filter: "Articles/Threads posted by Me"
    • When multiple articles are selected and the enter key is pressed, in addition to downloading and displaying the first article, the remaining selected articles are now also downloaded. Thanks to Cory Dodt for suggesting this.
    • Better at guessing a default news server for news users.
      Updates
    • Better data recovery in the case of a Pan or system crash.
    • Slightly faster threading of articles.
      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed crash that occurred when repeatedly loading the same group.
    • Better conformance to RFC977 2.4.1. This bug caused some binary attachments to be decoded improperly in 0.11.0. Thanks to Thomas K. Gamble for reporting
    • If saving attachments to disk because a directory isn't writable then give a warning in the Pan log and fail the task so that the user can fix the problem. Thanks to Sebastien Leclair for reporting this bug.
    • Build fixes for the Compaq C compiler on Linux Alpha. Thanks to Alan Young for reporting these problems and submitting a patch.
    • The Article cache was growing past the user-defined limit in 0.11.0. Thanks to Muralito and Alan Young for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed rare crash-on-exit bug that occurred when one thread was shutting down the Pan app log while another thread was trying to log a shutdown message. :) Thanks to Jed Baer for reporting this bug.
    • Now handles watching/ignoring a thread even if the article selected when 'watch' button is pressed has a broken References: header. (Shame on you Forte Agent 1.8! :) Thanks to David Watson for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed rare gui lockup bug when loading new articles for the group that's currently loaded.
    • "Flag Thread" and "Unflag Thread" didn't flag the entire thread as they should have. Thanks to Peter Borgmann for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed bug that caused groups to be threaded more often than necessary.
    • Fixed bug that didn't remember the "Thread/Unthread Header Pane" setting between sessions and required the button to be pressed twice before it would work. Thanks to Jed Baer for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed small compile problem reported by Gabi Davar and Francesco Lamonica.
    • Fixed bug that incorrectly saved the pane dimensions for the "three vertically stacked panes" layout mode. Thanks to Douglas Bollinger and Erik W. Hanson for reporting this bug.
    • Memory leaks fixed. Of course.

    November 2, 2001 - New Release:
    0.11.0 "Why Don't You Just Make Ten Louder"

      This is the first non-beta release in almost three months. Highlights of this release include important stability improvements, a tool to manage posting identities, fewer library dependencies, less memory usage, faster and less memory-intensive decoding, many small GUI improvements, *lots* of bug fixes, and a dozen updated translations. Many of Pan's modules have been rewritten for pthread stability.
      New Features
    • Added Profiles manager for managing what name, email address, signature file, custom headers, etc. to use when posting to different groups.
    • No longer requires the following packages: gtkhtml, glade, gnome-print, libgconf, libgal, libcapplet, bonobo, and oaf. We now display inline images and clickable URLs without these libraries.
    • Added a more quote colors for color-coding >>> One reply >> from the next > and so on.
    • Finally added support for writing posts with an external editor. Thanks to Sylpheed for this code.
    • Added an option to shorten names in the group pane; ie, "comp.graphics.apps.gimp" can be shortened to "c.g.a.gimp".
    • Added the ability to sort by read state (new, unread, number of new replies, etc) and by action state (flagged, queued, etc). Thanks to David Watson and Sapient Fridge for suggesting this.
    • Can now toggle between a normal font and a monospace font in the article body pane. Thanks to KNode for this idea.
    • Added Preferences option to toggle custom foreground/background colors in the text pane vs. using the default gtk theme colors. Thanks to Justin Piszcz for suggesting this.
    • The search field above the group and article lists are now comboboxes that remember earlier search fields. Thanks to Adam Nevins for suggesting this.
    • Added the ability to toggle the visibility of each of the main panes.
    • "Stable" sorting in the header pane, so that sorting in one column, then another, gives a two-key sort.
      Updates
    • Faster, less memory and disk-intensive decoding of attachments.
    • The menu has been rearranged to have more sensible feature groupings.
    • The "Save Article" and "Save Attachments" dialogs have been merged into a single dialog.
    • Nicer article navigation.
    • When Following up an article, the focus in the composer window is set to the message box rather than being hidden wherever the default was. Thanks to Cameron Kerr for suggesting this.
    • Slightly faster downloading of article headers and bodies.
    • Small improvements in Pan's configure script.
      Bug Fixes
    • Fixed crash when importing an empty .newsrc file, such as on startup when auto-importing a .newsrc file. This is the most-reported 0.9.7 bug. Thanks to Derek Poon for first reporting this problem and submitting a fix.
    • Fixed problems with different threads manipulating articles concurrently. This fixes many of the "pan crashes in unreproducable ways" bugs.
    • Articles' memory management is now tied to an article refcount of the group which owns them. This resolves the Article life cycle issues like "what happens if a rule deletes an article that articlelist is drawing?" and "what if an article is expired while a person's reading it?" etc.
    • Fixed crashes in the Task Manager dialog.
    • Fixed crashes in the progressbar when using pixmapped Gtk+ themes.
    • Fixes bug that caused some Tasks to get stuck in an Abort state even if they completed successfully.
    • Fixed bug that caused Tasks to sometimes not get run in the queue until another task was added to give it a bump. Thanks to Douglas Kilpatrick for tracking down this bug.
    • Fixed small but nasty memory corruption bug when saving attachments.
    • Fixes for creating/saving negated filter conditions. Thanks to Jed S. Baer for reporting this bug.
    • Fixes bug that didn't disconnect correctly from the news server when an error occurred while saving attachments.
    • Fix bug that caused Pan to crash when it was started in zoom mode. Thanks to Leo Lipelis for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed three different crashing bugs that occurred when torturing the article threads.
    • Some headers were not being saved for pending articles in the pan.sendlater folder. This caused problems when trying to post offline. Thanks to T'aZ, Frank Van Damme, and lots of other people for reporting this bug.
    • Fixes xml decoding bug. Thanks to Tõivo Leedjärv for reporting this bug and providing a patch.
    • Fix in GMime for Debian and Solaris charsets. Thanks to Volodymyr M. Lisivka for submitting a patch to GMime.
    • Fixed bug in encoding the From: header in new posts. Thanks to Julien Plissonneau Duquene and Christian Lohmaier for reporting for reporting this bug and to Jeffrey Stedfast for fixing it.
    • Build fixes for FreeBSD. Thanks to Christian Kuhtz for reporting these problems and suggesting fixes.
    • Fixed bug that kept reading/deleting an article from propagating to its crossposts.
    • Fixed fairly large memory leak when editing preferences.
    • Fixed problem with date header not being sent when sending mail from Pan. Thanks to Derek Poon for reporting this problem and submitting a fix.
    • "Get New Headers in Selected/Subscribed Groups" was queueing the groups tasks in reverse order. #62969
    • Ensure that Control+Return in the compose window is a shortcut for "Send Now" as it is in Agent. Thanks to Himanshu Gohel for reporting this bug. #62569
    • Fixed bug in the rot13 code that truncated lines when they encountered characters like ā, ō, or č. Thanks to Nightshade for reporting this bug.
    • Show the correct linecount in the Header Pane for multipart binaries when reposts are included in the multipart thread.
    • Wrap excessively long email addresses in the header display so that Pan's window doesn't strech off the screen. Thanks to David Watson for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed error with displaying mime articles with two or more text attachments. Thanks to Robert Tilley for reporting this bug.
    • Fix lockup from having a double-mutex thread lock if X can't load the user-specified font. Thanks to Thomas Gamble for reporting this bug.
    • Fixed annoying space reading bug that caused short articles to be scrolled offscreen, then back on again, before going to the next article.
    • Hitting "show all headers" didn't actually show *all* headers, just more headers. Thanks to Christian Lohmaier for reporting this bug.
    • In the article toolbar filter, switching between Subject and Author didn't cause the articles to be re-filtered.
    • Tab Damage errors in 0.10.0 fixed.
    • Other build fixes.
    • Small memory leaks fixed.