I'm baaaaaaaccccccckkkkkkkk....

After over 2 years without any pine updates, I have decided to revive Pine for the amiga.  The last official update was 3.96 though I did a 4.02 release .

I really haven't been away from the amiga. I still have my A4000/040 on my desk. It shares the desk with a Dual Athlon 1.2Ghz with 512M of memory running RedHat 7.1 and a 486DX4/100 with RedHat 6.1 running my gateway.

I was surprised. I thought no one used pine anymore. I emailed Samy and I was going to mail my diffs for 3.96 to him.  Since I'm a programmer at heart and I was between projects I thought I would resurrect Pine.

Things have changed alot in those 2 or so years. Computers have gotten alot faster. Cross-compilation is a much more viable option for programming on the Amiga. The 3-4 or so hours it took to compile pine 3.96 on my Amiga 4000/040 I can now do in ~10 minutes on my PII-350. Development time decreased dramatically.

I had still had a copy of the 4.02 source -- 4.02 has a new layout and new c-client code.. This was the basis for the new port. After downloading the 4.21 source, I tackled the c-client code first. Miraculously they still have my amiga code in there! I just fix a few bugs and had the c-client test-suite program running in under an hour. Pine and pico were a little bit tougher. Luckily in the 4.x series almost all of the os-dependent code is modularized. I just copied the os-dependent code from my 4.02 source to the 4.21 source, manually patched the source that wasn't in the os-dependent code and things came together pretty quickly. Total development time for the first "beta" release of 4.21 - 12 hours. In comparison, I think it was at least 2-3 weeks for the original 3.91 code to come together. Ahh speed kills ... compilation time.

June 22, 2000 - I have released a new version of Pine based on 4.21. The things I have fixed in this release are:

• Pine behaves much better in terms of locking local mailboxes. Pine should only lock the mailbox went writing to it or reading from it. This should help those people who keep pine running all the time and use a local mailer like qmail.
• I have reimplemented tooltypes to correspond to the appropriate command in pine. Here is the list of tooltypes. The appropriate command line option is in brackets.  For the options not listed you can use the argument directly (without the '-').
• FOLDER (-f) - start pine with this folder open
• CONTEXT (-c) - the context to use with the FOLDER option
• USEFUNCTIONKEYS (-k) - force the use of the function keys
• RESTRICTED (-r) - use pine in restricted mode
• INDEX (-i) - go directly to the message index
• INDEXNUMBER (-n) - jump to message x in the folder
• READONLYFOLDER (-o)  - open the folder as readonly
• PINERC (-p) - use an alternate .pinerc file
• PINECONF (-P) - use an alternate pine.conf file
• RECIPIENTS - mail to the following people.

Ah, the part everyone is waiting for, the goods. There are 4 archives:

• pine4.21.lha (FTP: pine4.21.lha),  68020+ versions pine4.21.lha (FTP: pine4.21.lha)- The main pine archive it just contains the binary and an icon with which you can launch pine
• pine-tools.lha (FTP: pine-tools.lha) - auxillary files for pine
• pico.lha (FTP: pico.lha) , 68020+ versions pico.lha (FTP: pico.lha) - The pico and pilot programs. Pico is the editor used in pine. This archive has the standalone executable.
• imapd.lha (FTP: imapd.lha), 68020+ versions imapd.lha (FTP: imapd.lha) - The IMAP/POP[23] daemons. These programs are used to allow users to access their mail located on your computer. Man pages are included in the archive. I actually haven't tried imapd yet.
• (FTP ONLY) pine-4.21.tar.gz - The original sources in tar-gzip'ed format
• (FTP ONLY) pine-4.21.diffs.gz - Amiga diffs in gzip'ed format. In the diffs are scripts to build for different CPU flavors, debug and non-debug. They are in the root of the source directory.

• The Official Pine homepage can be found at http://www.washington.edu/pine. The Pine FAQ is at http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/index.html.
• There is also a newgroup comp.mail.pine in which you can ask generic pine questions.
• If you find any problems with pine or suggestions, feel free to email pine@jshepher.dyndns.org. If you have a bug report, for speedier detection and resolution try to do the following:
• A precise guide of how to produce the problem and the result.
• If its reproducible, run pine with -d9. This mode produces a lot of debug output so I can track down the problem. Mail me the .pine-debug1 file you find in your home directory.
• If you run Enforcer/Mungwall, an enforcer hit log would be very beneficial. Enforcer logs are the quickest way for me to track down a problem.
• If you have any icons you want to put on the page feel free to send them to me - pine@jshepher.dyndns.org.

• Pull out the help text and put into an amigaguide file. Since in the 4.x series the help is HTML, it should be easier.
• Put back the icon options. This should be pretty easy to do. (Done June 22, 2000)
• Squash any bugs people find.