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Patches For Pine Going Away
md8mart writes to let us know about the imminent shutdown of the site that distributes Pine patches. From the RSS feed of Patches for Pine we read the following bad news for all Pine users: "The Department of Mathematics of the University of Washington will close the account that hosts my Patches for Pine site. I would like to thank the Department of Mathematics for having hosted this site for so many years. I do not have current plans to move this site, but this site will disappear on December 15, 2006. Thank you to everyone who supported me by positive feedback and encouragement to do this work through the years. I will update this information as it becomes available."
this is terrible!
between foregoing security updates or switching to that bloated thunderbird GUI monstrosity...
It's time to upgrade to Mutt.
:wq
or you could use emacs
..."deeply saddened" posts?
Its a nice email client, but the license is restrictive:
l
http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.htm
As Pine is not free software, time to move on to mutt or its next-gen friend, mutt-ng. No need to use a bloated GUI app to read mail.
As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".
I still use pine to access my Kmail mails when I'm not home- so long as Kmail isn't running I can access them fine (via ssh, of course). But I haven't seen pine updated for quite a while, so I can understand the reason to close the patches site. It just means that the program is finsihed! (therefore perfect)
http://lyricslist.com/
Rover as in the Fidonet mascot?
hemi
So the guy's .edu account is going away. Why doesn't he just get a .org domain and some hosting and just move the site there? Closing the site due to the loss of an .edu account sounds like a convient excuse to stop managing the site.
Just pass the torch man!
are you volunteering?
His kids could takeover anytime now, no ?
I don't care if pine is free or not. It's served me for many, many years. I use it daily, and it works well. It's not a gui app, either, though I'm not sure you were implying that it was.
As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".
That is false, and not terribly amusing. I had the great fortune to work for a number of years with one of pine's original developers. Over lunch one day, he told me that 'pine' isn't an acronym at all. But, he said, if it were to be made into a backronym, it was generally agreed that it should stand for "Pine Is a Neologist's Elm".
You all can figure out what 'pico' doesn't stand for.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
So.. why doesn't someone just take over and host it elsewhere?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
It's just pining for the Fijords!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
.. is to drag the tree outside and put it by the bin, and then hoover up the needles.
And no, don't tell me what other program I should use instead!
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
LONG LIVE PICO
This is a good thing for us I would say. An age old program is dying its death. Let it be...
I'm not familiar with the requirements for Sourceforge projects, but is there any reason why this project couldn't be hosted on Sourceforge?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Because Pine is not GPL/BSD Licensed open source program, it is owned by the Washington University and they allow you to make local changes, distribute free of charge, or charge in a packaged distribution for the packaging of the programs (IE not for pine/pico), but you are not allowed to comercially sell it, and must apply a local tag (L) to the patches or versions you change and distribute. Source
Granted it is a pretty open license, but UW Still owns it.
I'm not sure how your comment relates to the closing down of this peripherally-related site distributing unofficial patches for pine. The pine project will continue regardless, and the various patches will presumably still be available from whoever wrote them, you'll just have to Google for them instead.
I moved to Thunderbird years ago. I'm not very rich but I can easily afford the CPU horsepower needed by Thunderbird. For others there's always mutt.
Pine is just useless, and it should be abandoned.
I'm one of those crazies who uses Pine almost exclusively for my email. The patches site has some valuable additions for the app, and the closing of the site is a loss for the community. I hope the maintainer considers moving the site, even if it's not updated regularly, just for retention of the existing patches. Thanks!
Since 93, I've used a dozen different email clients. In most cases, they were not of my chosing. When I have a choice, I use pine. I have yet to find a small, capable client with such a straightforward, intuitively designed, user friendly interface. I have high hopes of Alpine but mutt, elm and emacs' rmail are inferior to pine.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
DOH! So next time I RTFA. (Nah!) :-D
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
http://www.geocities.com/win32mutt/win32.html
I know, I know...flame away
I switched from pine to CONE a long time ago. It looks nearly like Pine, but has integrated GPG support and works fine with IMAP folders.
See http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/cone00index.html for the website and http://wiki.splitbrain.org/cone for some info on compiling it.
Need a Wiki? Check out DokuWiki
Mutt is simple enough to configure when using IMAP to access a mailbox, but it starts to become a hassle when you want to send mail via SMTP. While Pine includes SMTP support, you have to use one of a number of third-party MTAs with Mutt for similar functionality. Setting all that up is often a hassle.
I know the arguments behind not adding such support, and having been a Mutt user myself for a while I understand the raw power it offers. But I also understand that many people don't want to spend a lot of extra time setting up their mail client just because it doesn't include some core functionality.
Still I disagree with your main point. If a non-OSS developer team gets out of funds for some reason, the source code of their project dies with the project. In the case of open source, if a program is needed enough, it can and probably will be continued by someone else. If the program is lacking much need, someone probably already wrote a better alternative based on the same source. So OSS still kicks non-OSS's ass! ;)
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Yup. This is hardly a disaster for the Pine community. I've been using Pine for at least 15 years now, and this is the first I've heard of this site. Looking it over, I don't see anything that I would personally find useful. There are about three dozen patches there, total. Not a single security fix among them. There are a few fixes for crash bugs which I've never encountered, and a bunch of patches adding or tweaking functionality. I'm sure some people will miss this site, but the vast majority of Pine users won't even notice.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
I haven't used pine in so long that I've forgotten it. I only used it for a short while, then used other programs for a long time, and now have used mutt for several years. Have you tried mutt? How would you compare them?
Infuriate left and right
This is a big deal, since it's where one would go to get threading of conversations and Maildir support.
With no site for pine patches I'll pine for patches while I mine patches to pine. :-(
When it was first developed, it was simply called "pine", kind of as an homage to elm. Laurence had several backronyms floating around in his head, because people kept asking what "pine" stood for. So he usually told them the one he preferred, which was the one about how the word pine was a neologism. He did just make the word up, after all, and I think he liked the connotation with slightly deranged people.
Years later, UW came up with the news and email thing as the "official" acronym. But it's not what it realy stood for originally when the program was first developed.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Can't he create a pine-patches project at Sourceforge.net and put the patches there? That's what I'd do.
I used pine quite a lot at the beginning of my email career, and it certainly does do nearly all of what you'd need an email client to do, and has an interface that is significantly better than it might seem at first blush.
But one thing it doesn't do--or at least, requires so much kludging to achieve that it might as well be impossible--is handle multibyte characters and alternative encodings. If I can't read and write email in Japanese, then I flat-out cannot use whatever client it is that lacks the feature.
So I guess I'll survive, insofar as I've been surviving for coming on a decade now.
They aren't the same school.
Also: "Pine" has supposed to stand for many different things but
the first one I heard (and I was there pretty early) was:
"Pine Is Not Elm".
The idea being it was easier to build pine than support
umpteen mail clients.
and I gotta tell you, it amazes me how may people use pine or (especially) webpine. Students especially want to do everything over the web.
I can understand why some people would choose pine (or mutt, or another console-run mail program), although I am not one of them. But if you've ever used any web email client other than webpine, you know what a dog webpine is. It's hard to find a web-based email that's worse than webpine.
The only thing I can figure is webpine was invented here, while squirrel mail (for example) wasn't. But it's not hard to come up with a handful of free, IMAP-aware web mail programs that are demonstrably better than webpine after about two minutes of use...
#DeleteChrome
"Compared to Pine" or any such mail client, mutt is ... certainly different.
I think one question in this discussion is whether MTA function can reasonably be expected to be merged with MUA function in a single program, the mail client. Boundaries of functionality are often blurry things. Maybe it depends on the application's audience? Configuring an MTA to work with mutt was not prohibitive or painful for me, nor, I expect, for many other mutt users. It makes you wonder who the intended audience is.
But let's not ignore the concept of "do one thing, do it well." Capability, flexibility, ease of use (for that "one thing"), and security all benefit from this. If leaving out MTA function improves the security of my client, spares the opportunity cost for use in MUA-specific development, and speeds the release cycle, among other potential benefits, that works for me. I'll personally pay for those benefits with a little MTA configuration. Heck, I like my MTA. I guess I can understand if people want to wash their hands of sendmail.
It all started when his wife began nagging him to put up the Christmas Tree...the rest is history.
But seriously...pine still has a large install base? Wow.
-MJ
Funny - I just installed it on one machine this morning. I'm using it to forward quarantined false positive spam - couldn't be bothered to read the manual for mutt so put pine on that mail server.
lol. you almost made me wet my keyboard for a second, dude!
explain me how a noob is supposed to configure sendmail (w/o the bat book) to connect to a remote host with ssl auth. that's a very common configuration requirement, and yet your typical linux/bsd system doesn't have a sendmail.cf setup for that by default.
just sayin'...
I don't use pine, so I don't have any use for patches, but I've put up a mirror: http://archives.scovetta.com/pub/mirrors/pine_patc hes/.
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
That being said, rules are meant to be broken. When you are designing an email client, it is reasonable to assume that your user will want to send email as well as receive it, and with more and more desktop Linux systems, it is also reasonable to assume that a lot of your users don't need to have an MTA configured on their machines. They may not want to configure an MTA or even know how. A trivial SMTP client is dead simple to implement. I understand mutt's decision not to include it, I respect their decision, and I humbly submit that they should have broken the "do one thing well" rule and just including a trivial SMTP client.
I mean, c'mon. It's easy and helpful.
Actually, I just remembered why I'm irritated at mutt for not speaking SMTP. At work, I must use Windows, and I installed mutt under cygwin. When I tried to send email, it didn't work, so I scratched my head and remembered I didn't configure SMTP. Well, low and behold you can't configure SMTP because it isn't even there. Well, that makes mutt totally useless under pine. Unless you're trying to tell me I should attempt to get qmail working on windows under cygwin--frankly, I don't even know if it's possible--just so I can send a bloody email. Yeah, so I downloaded this program called "Thunderbird" which implements this thing called "outgoing email".
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
So now one might have to wait for new revisions instead of patching an existing release.
That's kind of the issue...Pine seems to espouse a release strategy that makes Debian-stable look fast and furious.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The "do one thing" part of the UNIX philosophy is certainly a good point, but there's always room for argument as to what the 'one thing' of a project is.
I would argue that Pine's purpose is to send and receive mail -- so therefore, incorporating code to send and receive mail, isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's just doing its purpose.
Only if you narrow the purpose of a mail program to be only "read mail that's already been downloaded to the local system," does Pine overextend. But that's only one way of looking at mail. Breaking it into several different steps is one way to approach the problem ('downloading mail,' 'editing mail,' 'sending mail'), but treating it as one activity ('doing mail'), which should be solved with a single program, is another.
Plus, despite the advantages of the UNIX philosophy, the market has shown over and over, that users really don't like it. Users like integrated, monolithic, seamlessly integrated programs. Pine's integration of features is one of the reason it's managed to stay alive, despite having a ridiculously stupid license. The UNIX Way isn't the only way, and it's not even clear that it's always the best way in every situation.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
-With Pine you can use regular expressions to filter your messages,
...
-Pine is immensely more efficient handling high volumes of messages (the time Outlook uses to start when you have a few thousends of messages, lets say after a holiday, is ridiculous compared to Pine, which just get going).
And as for the groupware functionality, you can use both applications in parallel, Pine for what it does well (felxible email management), Outlook for groupware features. Each tool perfomrming an small taks and doing it well.
Oh wait, you use Outlook, sorry, you would never understand
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sorry for any email client not supporting smtp from the start is damaged goods.
What does it support instead then?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That is the exact analogy in regards to http protocol.
The respective RFCs made a clear differentiation between MTAs and MUAs for a good reason (you know, reinventing the wheel is lots of fun, but if it has been done before, why bother?).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
... will be told by his ISP how to configure a *good* MUA to use their server.
Or will be told by his employer to turn on the computer and click the mail icon.
If a noob want to do the work of a system administrator, all the power to him, learning is always interesting, but it is completely unnecessary to configure a half decent email client (MUA if you know what I mean).
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
You can use Pine for USENET.
But most people no longer know what USENET is.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.