Patches For Pine Going Away 177
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."
oh god no! (Score:3, Funny)
Rover (Score:2, Funny)
Re:oh god no! (Score:5, Informative)
Except that it isn't. It's the user site "patches for pine" that goes away, not pine, nor the pine web site, nor pine itself.
The official web site is at http://www.washington.edu/pine/ [washington.edu]
The site that will be closed is http://www.math.washington.edu/~chappa/pine/ [washington.edu]
Regards,
--
*Art
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Re:oh god no! (Score:5, Informative)
These patches have been around for a long time, and I'm sure the author has suggested them for upstream merger already.
You're on the right track concerning legal reasons, which is why there's so much fuss about Pine patches compared to other software patches. In my understanding, the license [washington.edu] forbids the distribution of unofficial versions, except for local use. You can only distribute your own version of Pine as a set of patches against the official version.
Distributions like Gentoo get around this nicely by automatically patching and compiling upon install. But the fact remains that Pine is not Free software in the sense that you would be free to distribute your improvements.
Personally, I'm not too worried as I believe the patches will find another home. I've used Pine since 1998, I think it strikes a very good balance between convenience of use and customizability, and I haven't found a decent alternative.
How would you compare pine and mutt? (Score:2)
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I tried Mutt at some point, but I got frustrated at how much customization it would require to get working the way I like. It seemed like it would be easier for me to write my own mail client (as I've already worked with textmode interfaces and there are tons of libraries for the network side). Besides, after things like threaded view and maildir format came into Pine, I had no need feature-wise to use anything else but Pine.
IMHO, Pine has pretty good U
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Are you trolling?
You forget (or are unable to use) remote access, then. I can check and reply to email from almost any machine, without
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That is a bet you would lose faster than outlook can lose all your email.
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Installed it this morning (Score:2)
Crap, so now I have to choose (Score:2)
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Re:Crap, so now I have to choose (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Crap, so now I have to choose (Score:4, Informative)
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Say what? 1 nano = 1000 pico.
How is that 'vitually identical'?
Besides I think the GP was talking about the diffence in program size/features. (In my mind, adding features is not necessarily a positive item.)
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I will now quitely go hide in a cave for the next 30 years
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Regards,
--
*Art
You might not live that long. (Score:2)
That's kind of the issue...Pine seems to espouse a release strategy that makes Debian-stable look fast and furious.
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*coughs up bloody phlegm*. "You insensitive clod!"
-b.
Just switch to CONE - nearly same interface (Score:3, Informative)
See http://www.courier-mta.org/cone/cone00index.html [courier-mta.org] for the website and http://wiki.splitbrain.org/cone [splitbrain.org] for some info on compiling it.
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Pine is still being developed - in fact, a text-mode replacement called Alpine is due to be released by UW soon. It's just a 3rd-party patch site that's going down.
-b.
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I rather like a flatfile backend. It makes it easier to edit corrupted message store files.
GUI front end? I thought we were talking about text mode mail clients?
-b.
upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)
Mutt's a pain in the ass to set up for SMTP. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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0-59/10 * * * * echo -e "USER fred\nPASS b00bies\nQUIT" |nc pop3.myisp.co.uk 110
replacing fred, b00bies and pop3.myisp.co.uk as appropriate. This will setup a POP3 connection (but not retrieve an
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There's more than one "way." (Score:2)
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 lo
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It goes into setting up SMTP as well as walking you through Mutt usage and configuration in general and is released under a creative commons license. Enjoy.
As for Pine, I don't like it as much as Mutt but still use it from time to time, particular
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Oh, and
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Same here. I keep seeing all these replies above about SWITCHING, but what about those of us that don't want to switch? I wish UofW would just release Pine under the GPL, or BSD license, but that isn't likely to happen. I don't like Muff but I don't think anyone can distribute a modified Pine under it's current license, which is not Free,
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export EDITOR=pico
export EDITOR=nano
Now run mutt. Bang - functionality of mutt with the irritation pine. Go ahead and set VISUAL=$EDITOR in your ~/.profile, and you get to use your favorite text editor almost everywhere (vipw, visudo, crontab -e, etc).
You can use whatever editor you want in mutt. It's one of the bazillion reasons that mutt's great.
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How about a change of license? (Score:2)
http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.htm
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Now is a great time to switch to mutt (Score:3, Informative)
As Pine is not free software [linuxtoday.com], time to move on to mutt [mutt.org] or its next-gen friend, mutt-ng [supersized.org]. No need to use a bloated GUI app to read mail.
As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".
That's not what "pine" means (Score:5, Funny)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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
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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."
I'm not sure why, but throughout my years of using Pine and other email clients, I have come to realize that mutt users cannot express why mutt is any good without also denigrating Pin
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My laptop is set up to connect to my work VPN (actually my, since I have my own consulting company) basically continuously, no matter what wireless net it's on. It's much faster to then ssh in to my mail server - BSD not Linux :) - and fire up pine or mutt than it is to wait for Thunderbird or (Zoraster forbid!) Outlook to start up. And 99% of the time, graphics in my work e-mail are irrelevant. For
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Pine® - a Program for Internet News & Email
That was added later (Score:3, Interesting)
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, a
Re:That's not what "pine" means (Score:4, Informative)
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PIne's message COmposition editor.
Re:Now is a great time to switch to mutt (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFWP : "In late 2005, Computing & Communications at the University of Washington began a project to create a new family of email tools built upon the Pine® Message System. This family of tools is called Alpine. Alpine consists of a UNIX command-line program, a PC version, and a Web version.
Alpine will be licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0."
PINE was my first UNIX mail reader on the now defunct MRC HGMP server circa 1995 (how I miss that account) so I grew to love it. That was around the time I still thought PICO was a neat editor. Then I found vi, them vim, then mutt, and I've not looked back
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As for what "pine" means, here is the truth: "Pine Is Not Enough".
Agreed. At my first job c. 1994 'pine' was the MUA we offered the dumb students, if they showed much of a clue, or needed to actually do something useful with their mail, we pointed them to 'elm'. It's quite funny to see the "I'm a power user, I distain these graphical clients and use the power of pine" posts wh
Re:Now is a great time to switch to mutt (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it so difficult to allow other people to say what they think, rather than pushing your values onto them?
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I didn't say he wasn't...in fact, I specifically attempted to ensure that I would not say that. He was and is entirely allowed to say that. My objecting to what I perceived as arrogance underlying his statement does not detract from his right to make said statement.
What I specifically objected to was his implicit assumption that *everyone* cares about whether or not software is free. (according to the FSF's definition) It's an assumption that FSF advocates
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I think you'd find it hard to find many FSF advocates who believe that everyone cares about it. One of the big goals of the FSF is to educate people and get them to care.
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I figure we might as well push our values to other people while we can than let MTV, **AA, G W Bush etc have all the fun
Of course in my opinion, force or threat of force should not be allowed. Because once you allow that, that soon reduces the odds of a useful and productive debate.
So saying that someone shouldn't say something, should be fine for most people, unless one is in a position of authority in which case some c
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1) It would be preferable to download a forked version rather than download patches separtely.
2) There have been no new versions of PINE for over an year - surely it would be nice to have a fork of the old Pine until Alpine is ready? Perhaps even after Alpine is released if some people do not like it?
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s/here/on\ this\ planet
Made that a bit less ambiguous.
well geez... (Score:2)
Just pass the torch man!
Easy for YOU to say... (Score:2)
Re:well geez... (Score:5, Interesting)
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of Washington math department!
-- William
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By all means, I will defer to you in this matter. All things considered...
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Um? Did you read TFL? He's losing his hosting, if the site is useful, and he wanted to continue, I don't mind helping. Haven't used pine in years, but (shrug) whatever. Not sure what your post is supposed to mean.
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Just pass the torch man!
Not the thing to say when talking about pitch-soaked wood products.
15 years after his account closed (Score:2)
Not the end of pine (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
Granted it is a pretty open license, but UW Still owns it.
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FYI, if you write something under the GPL, you own it too.
If someone violates the GPL as to code you have released under the GPL, you may sue them for copyright violation.
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The Project Is Not Dead... (Score:5, Funny)
Well, I guess all that's left.. (Score:5, Funny)
Question from a Pine user. (Score:2)
And no, don't tell me what other program I should use instead!
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The UI sucks and is so non-intuitive as compared to Pine that there's really no comparison.
-b.
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The way that the select menu is set up is actually quite intuitive since a simple "enter-enter" after starting pine gets you to your inbox. Besides, who's to say that you're starting pine to read e-mail? You could be using it to compose a new message and not want to type the address on the command line. Besides, I'm used to it - I've been using it for 10
Pine is the best email client I've used (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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Importance (Score:2)
No more patches for pine? (Score:3, Funny)
Sourceforge.net? (Score:2)
I'm at UW... (Score:2)
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 e
Mirror Available (Score:2)
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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
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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
Re:well there's always /usr/bin/mail (Score:5, Funny)
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This is no longer true. I can't find the link at the moment, but someone has ported vim to it, as a module.
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That's probably the one I was thinking of. Some quick Googling reveals that Viper is included in the standard distribution of Emacs 19.29 and XEmacs 19.12 and later.
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But what if I don't want a GUI e-mail client? Sure I can afford the CPU usage, but I'd rather have something small that lives in an SSH window or can even be used on systems where X isn't installed. And most of the graphics sent to me in e-mails are either (a) spam or (b) crap like signatures. The other 1% I can view in webmail should I need to.
Pine is
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I agree 100%. How difficult would it be for pine to know if it was running in an xterm window as opposed to a straight console and spawn an attachment viewer upon request. Better yet, Alpine (the pine replacement) is supposed to have te
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When you have pine on a server, you can use anything that can run a SSH client to connect there. Which, due to the wonders of MidpSSH, can be any device that supports J2ME, which means most of cellphones.
Which also means no need to lug a laptop for mere mail, which is a good theft preve
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Choice is good. How would the death of a project be good for someone who doesn't use it anyway?
As a system administrator, I frequently have to support crappy software and idiots, whether it's something one of my users has installed or something someone somewhere else has installed that one of my users is trying to communicate with. That said, there is a certain percentage of people out there using text based mail clients that do so beca