NEWS

Pan 0.14.90 is the first beta of a ground-up rewrite of Pan in C++.

Some of the best user-visible improvements:

  * The memory footprint for large newsgroups has been cut by 2/3.  (A month's
    worth of headers in a sample binaries group dropped from 283M to 94M.)
  
  * The time to download headers has been cut by 2/3 by parallelizing
    the download across multiple conections to the server.  (In the same
    sample group, downloading a months' worth of headers dropped from
    17 minutes to 5 minutes.)

  * The time to load large newsgroups from disk has been cut by 90%.
    (In the same sample newsgroup, the time to load from disk
    dropped from 14 seconds to 1.3 seconds.)

  * Multiserver support.  Pan can now download files in parallel not just
    with multiple connections to one server, but also to other servers.

  * NZB support.  Pan can now import NZB files.  It can also be started in an
    NZB client mode that doesn't create the newsreader window at all.

  * All of the user interface windows and dialogs have been redesigned.


Some of the best backend improvements:

  * The source code's line count has dropped from 44,382 to 23,093 --
    and is far cleaner.

  * Fewer library prerequisites: Pan no longer requires GNet or libxml2.

  * Better decoupling.
    _ Unit tests that were impossible before, such as tasks running and
      talking to a mock news server, can now be done.
    _ Pan can now run 'headless' to process queued tasks.
    _ The task and application layers are separated from the backend,
      so a database backend could be added in the future if desired.