[Pan-devel] Neat new features in CVS

[Charles Kerr]

I've been sick this week and have spent a little time tinkering on the
task manager rewrite I mentioned on pan-users a week or two ago.
The results are working so well for me that I've thrown caution
to the wind and landing it into CVS without forking the code into
stable & unstable branches (so Chris will probably flame me ;).

I think the patch is pretty cool, so if you build Pan from CVS, do a
cvsup, give it a spin, and post some feedback.

The patch has these features:

        * multipart tasks now try to use as many server connections
        as permitted, rather than just one, so that the task will finish
        twice (or three times, or four times) as fast.

        * if a "read article" task is added to the task manager,
        a connection is siphoned off of a multipart task to satisfy
        the request, then returned to the multipart task after
        the "read article" task is done.

        * connections are made available for other tasks after the
        multiparts are downloaded, rather than waiting until after
        the multipart is decoded.

        * tasks no longer fail if the network connection goes out.
        They just sit in the task manager in a "Queued" state, waiting
        for the network to come back up to resume their work.

        * if a task is moved above a running task in the task manager,
        connections are reallocated to the higher tasks.  Previously
        the promoted task had to wait for a lower task to finish
        or be stopped.

        * the task manager no longer freezes up while trying to connect
        to the news server.  Sluggish news servers previously gave the
        impression that the tasks hadn't been added to the task manager,
        since the task manager was tied up by trying to log in.

        * the latency time between one task ending and the next task
        beginning is almost nonexistent; previously there was a small
        pause.  This is a little thing, but to me it's very noticable
        when you queue up a bunch of single-part picture decodes.

cheers,
Charles