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Patches For Pine Going Away 177

Posted by kdawson from the pining-for-the-fjords dept.
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."
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Patches For Pine Going Away More

Patches For Pine Going Away

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  • oh god no! (Score:3, Funny)

    by krahli ( 556957 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @06:37AM (#16903082)
    this is terrible!
  • between foregoing security updates or switching to that bloated thunderbird GUI monstrosity...
    • Isn't there a free clone of Pine? Or did GNU just do a free clone of pico [gnu.org]? If not, perhaps pine can be released under a BSD-style license if it isn't going to be maintained anymore.

      • Re:Crap, so now I have to choose (Score:5, Informative)

        by CaptainAvatar ( 113689 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @07:12AM (#16903192)
        Check out Alpine [washington.edu]:
        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. The target date for the release of Alpine is October 1, 2006.
        Obviously they didn't meet the target date, but if you can't live without pine it looks like it's still going to be around, and more sensibly-licensed too.

      • Re:Crap, so now I have to choose (Score:4, Informative)

        by mustafap ( 452510 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @09:48AM (#16903652) Homepage
        Its the patches site thats going, not pine itself.
      • I consider Mutt the Pine replacement.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )
      The way I read it, pine isn't going away, just the "patches for pine" web site hosted by an individual. So now one might have to wait for new revisions instead of patching an existing release.

      Regards,
      --
      *Art
      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tsa ( 15680 )
      Come on, TB is not that bad. But it's unusable if you often log in to a Linux/Unix server from a Windows machine using ssh. I know a few people who do that often. They all use Pine because it's perfect for that. Runs in a terminal and has all the features you want. I've used it myself for about 8 years before switching to Thunderbird.
    • 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 [courier-mta.org] for the website and http://wiki.splitbrain.org/cone [splitbrain.org] for some info on compiling it.
    • between foregoing security updates or switching to that bloated thunderbird GUI monstrosity...

      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.

  • upgrade (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zdzichu ( 100333 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @06:39AM (#16903090) Homepage Journal
    It's time to upgrade to Mutt [mutt.org].

    • Mutt's a pain in the ass to set up for SMTP. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 19, 2006 @10:07AM (#16903730)
      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ajs318 ( 655362 )
        Can you not just use your own MTA at /usr/lib/sendmail? If you have to use your ISP's SMTP server then configure your MTA to send all mail via a smarthost. Dead easy to do with exim and not much harder with sendmail. If you have to do a POP3 retrieval before you can send SMTP then put this in your crontab:

        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

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by water-and-sewer ( 612923 )
        I agree, although frankly, Mutt is one of the things that keeps me using Linux. I really love it. This is as good a place as any to plug my Woodnotes Guide to Using Mutt, available at my website in HTML and PDF format: http://therandymon.com/content/view/42/79/ [therandymon.com]

        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
    • I've used mutt plenty, but pine remains my favorite console MUA. It's a vi/emacs thing, I guess, what's intuitive and pleasant to some is alien and intrusive to others.

      Oh, and :x

      • I've used mutt plenty, but pine remains my favorite console MUA. It's a vi/emacs thing, I guess, what's intuitive and pleasant to some is alien and intrusive to others.

        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,
      • Pick one as appropriate:
        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.
        • This is common knowledge, and you can change the editor in pine too. I'm a vi guy myself, and that's the way that I had it configured. The thing that mutt sucks at (IMHO) is functionality. It is in my opinion a poor console mailer compared to pine, and changing the editor does not fix that. Not like it matters any more, since everyone has switched to skynet (er, gmail).
  • Its a nice email client, but the license is restrictive:

    http://www.washington.edu/pine/overview/legal.html [washington.edu]

  • Now is a great time to switch to mutt (Score:3, Informative)

    by ptaff ( 165113 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @06:46AM (#16903112) Homepage

    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)

      by Wee ( 17189 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @07:01AM (#16903158)
      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.

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Alrescha ( 50745 )
        "> 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.

        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
        • I've never understood mutt anyway. The fate of Pine and nearly any other major character/terminal-oriented software no longer matters to me. I use bash to do certain configuration operations but that's it.
          • The fate of Pine and nearly any other major character/terminal-oriented software no longer matters to me.

            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

      • Wow, it's not hard...there's a link on his page to the official site for PINE, and one of the first things you see on that site is:

        Pine® - a Program for Internet News & Email

        • That was added later (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Wee ( 17189 )
          I said the same thing to Laurence when the topic came up. He made a face and told me that he didn't prefer UW's acronym, since the name doesn't really need one.

          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)

        by SorcererX ( 818515 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @10:17AM (#16903762) Homepage
        According to the PINE website ( http://www.washington.edu/pine/ [washington.edu] ) PINE stands for "Program for Internet News & Email".

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afabbro ( 33948 )
        Odd...for well over a decade I've heard it described as Pine Is Not Elm. In fact, that's about the only acronym that makes sense, and continues the tree naming standard nicely.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hornsby ( 63501 )
        You all can figure out what 'pico' doesn't stand for.

        PIne's message COmposition editor.

    • Re:Now is a great time to switch to mutt (Score:4, Insightful)

      by dan dan the dna man ( 461768 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @07:45AM (#16903284) Homepage Journal
      Maybe there will be a massive switch to Alpine [washington.edu]?

      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 :)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by illtud ( 115152 )
      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".

      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
  • 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?

    • Re:well geez... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by djh101010 ( 656795 ) * on Sunday November 19, 2006 @06:54AM (#16903144) Homepage Journal
      I sent him an email offering to host the site, we'll see what happens. I see patchesforpine.com is available (or was when this article was in "red" preview status). We'll see what happens; I can't see it being a huge load on my webhosts.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by William Stein ( 259724 )
        I also just sent him a hosting offer. And, I'm a professor in the University
        of Washington math department!

          -- William
        • I also just sent him a hosting offer. And, I'm a professor in the University of Washington math department!

          By all means, I will defer to you in this matter. All things considered...
      • Me too, I just sent him an email offering free hosting.

    • Just pass the torch man!

          Not the thing to say when talking about pitch-soaked wood products.
  • His kids could takeover anytime now, no ?

  • Not the end of pine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SystematicPsycho ( 456042 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @07:05AM (#16903170)
    So.. why doesn't someone just take over and host it elsewhere?

    • It's not Open Source (Score:5, Informative)

      by Crasoum ( 618885 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @08:12AM (#16903342) Journal
      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 [washington.edu]

      Granted it is a pretty open license, but UW Still owns it.
      • Granted it is a pretty open license, but UW Still owns it.

        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.
      • And that explains why the Pine Patches website, a project entirely divorced from the Pine project, can't be moved, how?

  • The Project Is Not Dead... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mister Transistor ( 259842 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @07:09AM (#16903182) Journal
    It's just pining for the Fijords!

  • Well, I guess all that's left.. (Score:5, Funny)

    by Channard ( 693317 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @07:15AM (#16903210) Journal
    .. is to drag the tree outside and put it by the bin, and then hoover up the needles.
  • I read TFA, but there wasn't more info than in the summary here. Now I'm using pine for a lot of years now and I want to keep using it. Does anybody know the development of pine well enough to say if it is likely that someone else will take over the patches? I saw that a lot of patches from other people [washington.edu] are present, so it's not that just one guy was working on it.

    And no, don't tell me what other program I should use instead!

  • Pine is the best email client I've used (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Wansu ( 846 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @09:18AM (#16903526)


    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.

    • What does pine do that mutt can't do? Or by "inferior" did you mean "confusing" (which is perfectly valid, even though I may well disagree)?
  • This is a big deal, since it's where one would go to get threading of conversations and Maildir support.

  • No more patches for pine? (Score:3, Funny)

    by phil.bachman ( 998005 ) on Sunday November 19, 2006 @02:05PM (#16905252)
    With no site for pine patches I'll pine for patches while I mine patches to pine. :-(
  • Can't he create a pine-patches project at Sourceforge.net and put the patches there? That's what I'd do.
  • 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 e
  • 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/ [scovetta.com].

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