Hi,

I have a growing frustration with NNTP news clients. The ones I have tested, and the list is long, are quite appalling. Each one has somewhere a flaw I simply can't overlook any more. I now want something I can fix myself if needed.

Anyway, I am thinking of starting such a project. But to save time, I might try and port XanaNews to Lazarus. Has this been done already, or has somebody started work on this that I could contribute to?

Regards,
- Graeme -

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:07:25 +0200 ???? ???????? Graeme Geldenhuys :

Did you tried Opera Mail (a component of Opera browser)? It's email client is very good for me, and it has support for NNTP. Do not know how good it is, because I don't use NNTP, but you may give it a try.

Misha Padalka wrote

Did you tried Opera Mail (a component of Opera browser)?

Yes, the email client is nice, the NNTP client is not so nice. Some issues with Opera NNTP client [off the top of my head]... I have to manually mark messages as Read (I can't for the life figure out why it doesn't do that automatically once I viewed a message), and searching a newsgroup gave me lots of issues.

Searching is something I do often. Attachment handling is something else I do often. Opera was fine with attachments, but that is where Mozilla Thunderbird falls over again.

Please note... in most cases these types of programs work fine in their email "mode", but their NNTP support seems to lag far behind. This is why I am now looking at dedicated NNTP-only clients as well.

XanaNews has had excellent feedback, plus if I don't like something, I should be able to fix or change it. I know Object Pascal, not Java, C, C++ etc. I'm also trying to shy away from console based NNTP clients (there are many of those for Linux, FreeBSD etc) because copy and paste between my desktop and such clients normally don't work, plus their shortcuts etc are all totally different [takes ages to relearn those], compared to GUI applications (which seem more standardised).

Regards,
- Graeme -

I do not know any efforts to port xananews to lazarus, but I will be very interested to help porting it.

I think I have the basic components already installed (virtualTreeView & INDY 5 for sure) but I do not know if there are more to install. In any case if you do set up a repository I would appreciate a poke.

By the way I am on windows 32bit only at the moment.

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

Please note... in most cases these types of programs work fine in their email "mode", but their NNTP support seems to lag far behind. This is why I am now looking at dedicated NNTP-only clients as well.

KNode from KDE 3.5? Works well for me.

Martin

/me uses latest stable Thunderbird and news.gmane.org news server ;)

L.

Did you try http://pan.rebelbase.com/ ?

Leonardo M. Ram? wrote

Did you try http://pan.rebelbase.com/ ?

Like I said, I have tried just about every client out there.

Problems with Pan:
* No offline support. Well, it only caches a single newsgroup for offline support. Cache another newsgroup, and the first one's cache is removed. Offline support is important to me, because I I need to search message bodies across multiple newsgroups.
* I was blown away, when I noticed that you can't add attachments to a new post!
* You can't save attachments from other peoples posts. Important for me to get patches or review screenshots from bug reports etc.

Good news is, Pan looked good and is much faster than Mozilla Thunderbird. Unfortunately the above problems makes it a no go.

So far only XanaNews works for me in all my test cases... but unfortunately it is Windows only. I'm running it inside a Windows VM at the moment, but will definitely not do that the whole time.

I guess I just need to start porting XanaNews then.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:57:46 +0200 ???? ???????? Graeme Geldenhuys :

Auto-marking messages as read is configurable, it's just default setting to mark them manually. And I found handy that they are need to be marked manually. I just keep messages I want to return in a small time unreed. Such a simple lifehack :)
Haven't tried searching however.

Little offtopic, but maybe I'm missing something interesting in NNTP? Are there some live topics about FreePascal/Lazarus/etc?

Misha Padalka wrote

Auto-marking messages as read is configurable, it's just default setting to mark them manually.

My preference is other way round. And if I want to return to a message later, I normally "tag" the message. Most email and news clients worth using supports tags like 'personal','todo','important',etc. Opera actually does tagging very nicely.

Little offtopic, but maybe I'm missing something interesting in NNTP? Are there some live topics about FreePascal/Lazarus/etc?

Not to rehash an age old argument, but I much prefer NNTP over Mailing Lists or Web Forums. Anyway, I host/manage my own NNTP Server for projects I closely work on. eg: tiOPF, fpGUI, FPTest. I also follow other newsgroups like Embarcadero, NexusDB, Open Watcom etc.

On a side note:
If anybody has an open source project they work on, but is in need of a discussion / support infrastructure for that project, I am more than will to host a newsgroup for you for free. Just send me an email.

Regards,
- Graeme -

Hi,

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

Anyway, I am thinking of starting such a project. But to save time, I might try and port XanaNews to Lazarus. Has this been done already, or has somebody started work on this that I could contribute to?

This is just a quick follow-up on this topic. It was reported that the official XanaNews repository and domain has vanished. The domain name doesn't resolve for some time already. Luckily I cloned the full history of the original repository back in March. Commit history was very slow, so I am pretty sure what I have is still the latest code. Last commit recorded was r373 (dated 2012-12-30).

Anyway, I made XanaNews available on Github, so it will not be lost again. Contributions are welcome - just send me a pull request.

My plan for XanaNews is to port it to Lazarus so everybody can enjoy a descent GUI NNTP client. Not 100% sure when I'll start this, but first things first.... make the code available in a reliable location, then study the code.

You can find XanaNews source code at:

https://github.com/graemeg/xananews

Github also allows you to download a ZIP archive of the latest code in each branch.

Regards,
Graeme

Lazarus!?!??!?! Not fpGUI? Have I had enough coffee? Not that I'm complaining, mind you ;)

Thanks for saving the source.

I'd guess that the program is written in Delphi in VCL and thus it's easier to port it to Lazarus with its LCL instead of fpGUI.

Regards,
Sven

Reinier Olislagers wrote

Lazarus!?!??!?! Not fpGUI?

:)
fpGUI would be my first choice (and its definitely up to the task), but LCL will probably attract more contributors in the long run. The idea is to eventually hand over the project to somebody else.

Regards,
Graeme

Graeme Geldenhuys wrote

fpGUI would be my first choice (and its definitely up to the task), but LCL will probably attract more contributors in the long run. The idea is to eventually hand over the project to somebody else.

Sounds like a plan.