getting pine to run under fedora 0.94 -- a couple issues

[Mike A. Harris]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Robert P. J. Day wrote:

>> I found it by doing a quick search on "libcom_err.so.3" .  It was filed 
>> on the "distribution" component which maybe is why you didn't find it. 
>> I guess this is correct because it can't be a problem with pine, since 
>> there is no pine in FC test2, but it's also not really a problem with 
>> kerberos, since nothing else needs this.  Not sure how this can be resolved.
>
>i know, it's a tough call.  even bill from red hat observes, in that bug
>report, that it's not proper to obsolete pine.  but, OTOH, if it's not
>part of the official distro, there's no obligation on red hat's part to
>see that it still works.  bummer.

I'm the maintainer of the pine package in the distribution for 
releases in which it is supported, and I continue to maintain it 
unofficially for releases in which Red Hat does not officially 
support it.  The difference between the two, is that for 
officially supported releases, I will be providing security 
updates, and in the past major bug fixes as well.  For the newer 
versions of pine which are not officially supported by Red Hat, I 
am doing it voluntarily because I use the software myself 
(despite it's evil license, and development being done in a black 
room with no windows).

As security issues arise with pine 4.5x and newer releases that
come out, I'll be applying security fixes to my RPM packages that
are made available from the pine team or others in the community,
however I probably wont spend any time developing fixes myself.  
One other difference, is that I will track the current upstream 
pine version, and when new versions come out, I'll update to them 
instead of backporting bug and security fixes to older versions.  
That relieves me of the annoying burdens pine maintenance 
sometimes imposes at the most inopportune times.  ;o)


>i like pine since it's CLI -- i have no overwhelming interest in a 
>GUI-based email client, but i suspect i'll have to bite the bullet
>and move over at some point.  (for people who migrated off of pine,
>what did you find the easiest to move to?  just curious.)

There is an alternative to pine called "cone" which I will be 
investigating for possible inclusion in Fedora Core 2.  It is 
produced by the Courier MTA people, and I've heard good things 
about it, although I don't know if it provides all of the 
functionality that pine does yet or not.  If it provides the 
features I need from pine, I'll probably bite my tongue some day 
and make the switch.  Having been a pine user for about 9 years 
across many operating systems and architectures, it'll be hard to 
let go of pine, even though it is evil...  ;o)  In some ways, 
using pine feels like wearing Sauron's one true ring...  It's 
hard to shake.

Where's Gollum when you need him...


-- 
Mike A. Harris     ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat