ANN: Pan 0.9.7 "Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality" Released

[Charles Kerr <charles rebelbase com>]

Pan 0.9.7 "Just Another Victim of the Ambient Morality" has been released.
It can be found at http://pan.rebelbase.com/.

What is Pan?

   Pan is a newsreader, loosely based on Agent and Gravity, which
   attempts to be pleasant to use for new and advanced users alike.
   It has all the typical features found in newsreaders and also
   supports offline newsreading, multiple connections, and a number
   of extra features for power users and alt.binaries fans.
   
   It's also the only Unix newsreader to get a perfect score on the
   Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval evaluations.  See
   http://pan.rebelbase.com/features.html for the rest of the
   sales pitch.

About 0.9.7

   Pan 0.9.7 has a faster startup time, smaller memory footprint,
   more accurate decoding of binary attachments, better handling of
   corrupt headers and .newsrc files, some usability and speed
   improvements, and about 30 bugfixes.

   This is is the first stable release in two months, so the full
   list of improvements is fairly long.  However 0.9.7's also been
   battle-tested by users through five prereleases, so hopefully all
   these improvements won't yield new bugs.

   0.9.7 also represents a large effort to clean up Pan's internals
   for easier maintainence and automated regression testing.

   NEW FEATURES

      * Added filter-by-author to the thread toolbar.

      * When deleting or marking read a crossposted article, the
        action operates on all the crossposted copies of the article.
        Thanks to Bob Broughton for requesting this feature.

      * Added the ability to pause the task manager's queue.  Thanks to
        Phillip Pi, Ron Youvan, Ryan Daniels, and others for requesting
        this feature.

      * Added the option to automatically import a .newsrc file on
        startup and export it on shutdown.

      * Added menu buttons for removing cached article bodies for
        selected articles, threads, or an entire group.  Thanks to
        Budman for suggesting this feature.

   UPDATES

      * Now loads unsubscribed groups only when the "all" group tab is
        clicked instead of automatically on startup.  This lets Pan start
        faster and use less memory.

      * Now requires much less memory to decode attachments.  Thanks to
        Wendell Dingus, Aluminum Foil Ball, and many others for suggesting
        this.

      * Changed the local article cache to make it likelier that a
        failed multipart decode will keep the parts it successfully
        downloaded for a retry.  Thanks to Frederik Vanrenterghem and
        Aluminum Foil Ball for suggesting this change.

      * Duplicate filenames during saving attachments are now renamed
        foo_2.gif, foo_3.gif, etc. instead of foo.2.gif, foo.3.gif, for
        beter sorting.  Thanks to Ron Youvan for suggesting this change.

      * Better handling of thread tracking even when an article in the
        thread has a corrupt References: header.  Thank to Jim Henderson
        for reporting this problem and Adrian von Bidder for suggesting a
        solution.

      * More consistent checking for corrupt article headers from the news
        server.  Sideways thanks to usenetserver.com for providing corrupt
        headers repeatably so that I could track this down.

      * Better recovery when importing of missing, corrupt, or
        completely broken .newsrc files.

      * Text in an alt.binaries.pictures article is now displayed before
        the pictures, rather than after them, by request from Margus Ramst
        and Frank Van Damme.

      * Now handles FIFO .signature files.  Thanks to Daniel Burrows for
        suggesting this feature.

      * Updated some icons.  Thanks to Paolo Bacchilega for suggesting
        these changes and providing icons.

   BUG FIXES

      * Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash while decoding some articles.

      * Fixed crash in the "reply with external mailer" utility.  Thanks
        to Mohit Agarwal and Gareth for reporting this bug.

      * Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash sometime when posting or when
        loading the pan.sent folder.   Thanks to Pete at gmx.net and
        Wolfgang Schricker for reporting this bug.

      * Fixed bug that caused Pan to crash when the user tried to send
        mail without having a mail server defined.  Thanks to Cory Hill
        for reporting this bug.

      * Now correctly decodes uuencoded multipart posts that have non-uu
        text (such as checksums or ads added by newsservers) at the end
        of each post.  Thanks to Ken Geis, Gauze, Aluminum Foil Ball, 
        Kim Robinson, and everyone else who reported this.

      * Handle multiple UU-encoded attachments correctly.  Thanks to
        Huub Reuver for reporting this.

      * Quoted and original text are now colorized correctly in
        HTML mode.

      * Now sends "MODE READER" upon connection to make some INN news
        servers happier.  Thanks to Achim Settelmeier for reporting
        this bug.

      * Fixed focus bug in thread view when toggling between zoomed
        panes.  Thanks to Julien Plissonneau Duquene for reporting this
        bug and supplying a patch.

      * Resumed mulitpart downloads didn't show their progresses
        correctly in the progress bar in the bottom of the main window.
        Thanks to Adam Huffman and Sandor Barany for reporting this bug.

      * The "open attachments" command now works properly even when there
        is more than one attachment in the file.

      * Moving back to the zoomed thread view from the zoomed article
        view no longer moves the thread view down to the bottom of the
        list.  Thanks <i>very</i> much to Samuel Solon for providing a
        workaround to this gtk+ bug.

      * Fixed problem with the list panes looking wrong under dark gtk
        themes.  Lots of people reported this bug, but special thanks
        go to Duane Healing and Jed Baer for helping track this one down.

      * Attachements with filenames containing apostrophes are now
        correctly saved.  Thanks to Ron Youvan for reporting this bug.

      * Selecting all tasks in the task manager and hitting 'move task
        down' repeatedly would cause Pan to go into a loop until the
        task manager window was closed.  Thanks to Yannick Pollart for
        reporting this bug.

      * Is anyone still reading this?

      * Save-Article-Text will now download the article's body if it
        hasn't been downloaded already.  Thanks to Jacob Christensen
        for reporting this bug.

      * Better handling of encoded email addresses.  Thanks to
        hristian Lohmaier for reporting a couple of encoding-related
        bugs.

      * Fixed RH problems with the RPM spec files.  Thanks to
        Yosi Markovich for reporting this bug.

      * Move and Copy articles to a folder acted the same, but Move
        should have removed the articles from the original group.
        Thanks to Wolfgang Schricker for reporting this bug.

      * Small memory leaks and other small bugs fixed.

cheers,
Charles