> On Sat, 03 Nov 2001 02:07:45 +0000, pip in article
> dashed off:
>>> Hi all,
>>> There is currently a long debate regarding this subject, and I
>>> would like to get the *facts* sorted out.
>>> Which way is better ?
>>> Which way is more efficient ?
>>> Who knows, I don't so I'm going to list the pros and cons as I see them
>>> so lets have at it, and unleash the dogs of war ?
>>How about Pan? There is a new version available as we type.
> Fair comment but I felt that Pan is too "Agent" like and would muddy the
> waters ?
> My Wife is actually using Pan at the moment, and fetching news from
> my news spool, and for new user, Pan is definetly easier to use
> than Slrn, tho she's been using Slrn intermittently till now.
> I installed the version that is on Debian stable which is
> pan 0.7.6-1, I may grab the latest tarball and make a deb out of it.
> But feel free to run a Pan v/s anything comparo if you want or even
> combine it into this thread ?
I'll do a bit of that :)
I use slrn most of the time, sometimes, I use pan (0.10.0.93 currently)
mostly for binaries newsgroups.
Slrn has speed and stability all over pan, slrn has never crashed in
the last 4 years since I started using it. Not once. Pan however, has
crashed quite often, although it is much better now than a few versions
ago. There are some memory leaks in the code, or at least, that's what
it appears to me to be. Having said that, Pan is "mostly stable" and the
binaries features are nice. I like the paned approach, and I like having
the option of tabbed windows instead. One thing slrn doesn't do, is
allow you to edit a followup whilst you read other messages. This may
sound silly, but sometimes it's nice to be able to check something that
someone said, or look a message or two ahead to see if someone else
covered a point. However, it's no problem with slrn to ^Z the editor (I
use vim) and read whatever messages you want, and then continue with the
edit. Pan can either work off of a local spool via leafnode or whatever,
or a remote spool. Either way. It can also use your .newsrc file which
is nice. Over all I prefer slrn, but I can see the day coming when that
might change if pan's improvement continues apace. Pan's scoring is not
as good as slrn's, but from what others have said, it's far better than
agent's. Slrn can pipe a message to a shell, which is a very useful, but
somewhat less common need for newbies.
I would recommend Knode or Pan for newbies, or those who just have to
have a gui app, Knode has most of the features of pan, and seems to be
a bit more stable, but I don't use it enough to say for sure. Slrn is
definately a great console app, I don't need/want tons of real estate
devoted to icons and menus I only use once in a while.
Bit rambling, but there you are, that's my humble opinion.
--
Jim Richardson
Anarchist, pagan and proud of it
www.eskimo.com/~warlock
Linux, because life's too short for a buggy OS.
by