Pan - A GNOME Newsreader

This is Pan, a powerful and user-friendly Usenet newsreader for GTK. The latest information and versions of Pan can always be found at Pan website.

The sales pitch

Pan is good for Reading News.

• Pan is the only Unix newsreader to score 100% on the Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval newsreader evaluations.
• Pan has keyboard bindings for mouse-free newsreading.
• Basic newsreader features, such as reading and writing news, threading articles, and replying via email, are supported.
• Articles can be sorted by author, date, subject, or the number of unread children in the thread.
• Multiple connections are supported, so articles can be read while binaries are downloading.
• Articles can be filtered by regular expression matching, read/unread state, binary/text, etc.
• Works well as an offline reader.
• Articles can be queued until you want to go online, and can be re-edited at any point before they’re posted.
• A flexible rules system allows you to delete, hide, download, or notify you of, etc. articles that match a subject, or are posted by a particular user, and so on.
• The same system can be used to define automatic actions on behalf of the user: auto-download, auto-cache, auto-delete etc.
• Groups can be filtered by regular expression matching subscribed/new/all, etc.

Pan is good at Binaries.

• Attached images can be shown inline.
• Pan can download and thread articles as quickly as bandwidth allows.
• uuencode, MIME, and yEnc attachments are all supported.
• A task manager lets you reorder, cancel, and resubmit download tasks.
• Multiple connections are supported, so many binaries can be downloaded simultaneously.
• Multipart articles are automatically grouped together.
• Non-binary, incomplete multipart, and saved messages can be filtered out of the article list.
• Files can be attached to a Usenet article and are automatically encrypted with yEnc, threaded and referenced by Pan.
• Articles can be encrypted or signed with a public or private PGP key for enhanced privacy and security.
• Connections can be encrypted with the TLS protocol.

Release Notes

• You are advised to back up your $PAN_HOME directory (by default, $HOME/.pan2) before upgrading Pan.
• If you have previously been using a localhost server with stunnel and you now want to connect directly to a news server using the actual server address, do not create a new configuration entry for the server. Pan treats a new entry as a new server and does not preserve existing data on your subscribed groups, even though you are connecting to the very same server as before. Always edit the existing server configuration to preserve your subscriptions.
• Directories to search for SSL certificates can be defined with environment variables ‘SSL_CERT_DIR’ or ‘SSL_DIR’.
• To use password storage provided by GNOME Keyring or libsecret, build Pan with support for that feature, and then enable it in Edit -> Preferences -> Miscellaneous -> ‘Save passwords in password storage’.

Requirements

Pan requires these libraries:

• GLib 2.17.6 or higher (optionally GLib 2.26.0 or higher to support multiple Pan instances)
• GTK 3.16.0 or higher
• GMime 3.0.0 or higher (optionally with PGP cryptography support)

The following libraries add extra features but are optional:

• GSpell 1.x for spellchecker support
• libnotify 0.4.1 or higher for notifications
• libsecret 0.16 or higher and gcr 3.20 or higher for password storage
• D-Bus to support running multiple Pan instances
• GnuTLS 3.0.0 or higher for encrypted connections (TLS 1.x)
• ITS Tool for built-in user manual

The following libraries are experimental and not suitable for any use other than testing. Use at your own risk:

• WebKitGTK 1.8.1 or higher for embedded HTML

On Debian and derivatives, required dependencies can added with:

sudo apt-get build-dep pan

Installation

Cleanup autotools remnants

Some people has issues when using cmake to build Pan after using autotools. Unfortunately, autotools leaves a lot of files that may break build with cmake, so here are the instructions to clean all autotools remnants.

This procedure is to be run once if you used to build pan with autotools in your repository.

First, check the list the files to be deleted:

git clean -dxn

Then, delete all extra files:

git clean -dxf

Alternatively, you can clone Pan in another directory.

Standard build

Run the following command to setup Pan build with the default options:

mkdir -p std-build
cmake -B std-build

To setup options, you can run:

cmake-gui -B std-build

Then build pan:

cmake --build std-build -j 8

Optionally, run tests (even if they are few of them):

ctest --test-dir std-build

Installation

To install pan:

cmake --install std-build

Uninstall pan (see Stack Overflow link for details):

xargs rm < std-build/install_manifest.txt

Build options

Pan can be build with several options:

option	usage	default
ENABLE_MANUAL	built in user manual	off
WANT_DBUS	enable D-Bus support	off
WANT_GKR	enable GNOME Keyring or libsecret support	off
WANT_GMIME	enable GMime cryptography support	off
WANT_GNUTLS	enable GnuTLS support	on
WANT_GTKSPELL	enable GtkSpell support	on
WANT_NOTIFY	enable libnotify support	off

These options can be listed with the following command:

cmake -B std-build -LH

Debug build

You can also create a debug build:

mkdir -p debug-build
cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -B debug-build
cmake --build debug-build -j 8

CC++ language server support

To get language server support (e.g. ccls), run:

mkdir -p debug-build
cmake -H. -B debug-build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=YES
ln -s debug-build/compile_commands.json .

Upgrading

Upgrading typically requires that you do the exact same procedure as when installing Pan.

How to report bugs

For details on how to report bugs, see Pan bug report page.

Help Wanted

Several areas are in need of work:

• Pan still contains a lot of GTK2 code which triggers a lot of warnings. I’d welcome patches there.
• The Wiki page on Gitlab is empty. Help is welcome there.

Contact

Mailing lists

To get in touch with Pan contributors and community members, subscribe to one of the Pan mailing lists.

pan-announce

This is a low-traffic list for announcements of new Pan releases.

pan-users

This is a high-traffic list for feature requests, user questions, bug reports, and most everything else.

pan-devel

A developers’ forum to discuss hacking on Pan’s source code. New developers are welcome.

And a big thank-you goes to Savannah for hosting these lists.

Newsgroups

Pan mailing lists can also be accessed through the Gmane email to news gateway:

• gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.announce
• gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.user
• gmane.comp.gnome.apps.pan.devel

Links

• GTK
• GNOME
• GNU