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Software The Internet

Alpine 1.00 Brings Pine Back 204

Posted by Soulskill from the old-friend-new-face dept.
TreeDork alerts us that Alpine 1.00 has now been released by the University of Washington. The full source and documentation are available."On the surface, Alpine will appear strikingly similar to the Pine Message System, and it is upwards-compatible for existing Pine users. Alpine is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0. The source code has been reorganized from the ground up to separate the user interface code from the underlying email engine itself. All of the source needed to build Unix, Windows, and Web-based mail user agents is included.
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Alpine 1.00 Brings Pine Back More

Alpine 1.00 Brings Pine Back

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  • I guess I still have to ask (Score:5, Funny)

    by ByOhTek ( 1181381 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @08:25AM (#21777916) Journal
    Is Alpine still not elm?

  • Alpine? Pine? (Score:3, Funny)

    by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @08:27AM (#21777936) Homepage Journal
    Why, in my day, we just had mail. That was it. Just mail. No fancy HTML support, fonts or colors, no menus. Just commands. And we liked it that way!

    You kids and your newfangled elm, pine, alpine, whatever...now you kids get offa my lawn!

    • Re:Alpine? Pine? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Guinness2702 ( 840158 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @08:52AM (#21778110)
      telnet slashdot.org 25
      HELO guinness.internet.outthere
      MAIL FROM: guinness2702@slashdot.org
      RCPT TO: morgan_greywolf@slashdot.org
      DATA
      From: Guinness2702
      To morgan_greywolf
      Subject: Re: Alpine? Pine?

      You got to use mail? Luxury! Luxury, I tell's you.
      Back in my day, all we got was a telnet client and a dns query tool
      Bah, kids don't know they're born these days.
      .

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 )
        You had DNS?!

        Lucky.

        We just had a really huge, sloppily-maintained copy of /etc/hosts on each systems.

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by Guinness2702 ( 840158 )
          Hmm, missed an opportunity then. Okay, here goes

          *sharp intake of breath*

          Why when I was young all we got was a PDP-11 with a card puncher with cards that we had to give to the office boy who'd get on his bike, take to the cards and the one card reader the company had to the other office where they'd read them in reply to the message and the give the cards with the replay, and the reader back to the boy who'd bring the reply back to our office!
      • Knock if off you two. I just finished a two week run with my community theater's production of "Julius Caeser" as Caeser's understudy, and I don't want to have to school you both with an Aldis Lamp!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dubl-u ( 51156 )
        Back in my day, all we got was a telnet client and a dns query tool

        You had DNS? Luxury! Why back in my day, there was just one HOSTS file, and everybody shared it.

        Oh, and Bitnet. We had Bitnet [wikipedia.org], too. Yes kids, way back when, there were competitors to the Internet.

        Christ, I wish I were kidding. KA9Q represent, yo!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Lennie ( 16154 )
        You had DNS ? What a luxery, we just had a large host-file.
    • If Microsoft keeps on going the way they are going [microsoft.com], we might actually arrive back at text-only email at some time in the near future.

  • Um... Where pine go? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jchawk ( 127686 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @09:21AM (#21778416) Homepage Journal
    Not to ask the obvious question but where did pine ever go?

    I've been using pine for as long as I've had email. Probably for the same reasons everyone else is. It does exactly what I need. I'm lazy. And it's worked for the past 10+ years.

    So I'm not sure that pine ever went anywhere to begin with. :-P

    • Re:Um... Where pine go? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Professor_UNIX ( 867045 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @09:34AM (#21778566)
      The old Pine license precluded it from being included in binary format in any distributions unless they chose to violate the license. Alpine doesn't have that problem. I don't know why this is particularly news though since I've been using Alpine on my Ubuntu Feisty box since May.

  • Licence Fixed At Last (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ajs318 ( 655362 ) <sd_resp2@earthsh ... minus herbivore> on Friday December 21, 2007 @09:23AM (#21778436)
    It's good that they've fixed the licence at last. The old PINE licence was a problem for distributions; getting it to work the way a particular distro wanted required modifying it, which -- for .rpm / .deb based distributions with pre-compiled packages -- was against the strictest interpretation of the terms. UW always tended to turn a blind eye to this (even hosting modified RPMs), but this isn't something you should ever rely on.

    • I had been downloading and compiling PINE because of this license issue, so I expected some third party to create a differently licensed clone for some time. Imagine my surprise when the expected PINE clone (no pun intended, honest) arrived from no less an institution than UW, distributors of the original PINE. For those who, like me, wondered why they didn't just relicense PINE and call it "PINE 5.0," the Alpine story [washington.edu] 'splains it. I never realized that trademark issues were involved. Quoth Alpine:

      We

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by skeeto ( 1138903 )
      Now that pine, in the form of alpine, is free software, maybe it's worth taking a look at now. I never bothered before due to the non-free license.
  • Linus Torvalds uses alpine [apcmag.com]. I'm going to try it out just for nostalgia's sake. Pine was the first email client I can remember using (not including compuserve's "email" client or those that ran on private BBSes and didn't allow sending messages outside).

    I've tried using mutt, but there seems to be a big learning curve before a mere mortal can use it. Pine was self-explanatory from the start, with on-screen menus that made everything easy. On the other hand, Pine ran on a university server that was alread

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kludge ( 13653 )

      set up Postfix or create mail directories, which may have been necessary had I run Pine on my own computer


      You don't need to run your own mail transfer agent if you don't want to. You can have alpine read from an IMAP mailbox on another computer, e.g.
      inbox-path={mail.foofoo.com/ssl/user=pants}INBOX
      and you can have it send mail directly to a mail transfer agent on another computer:
      smtp-server=smtp.myisp.net

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Fweeky ( 41046 )

      I've tried using mutt, but there seems to be a big learning curve before a mere mortal can use it.

      Nice keybindings [linuxbrit.co.uk] help; 98% of my use in mutt is just left/right/up/down -- far left is the mailbox list, right enters a mailbox, right enters a mail, right lists the attachments, right views an attachment. r/g for reply, m to write a new message. l ~s foo to search (limit) by subject, l ~f to search by from, etc.

      bind pager <up> previous-line
      bind pager <down> next-line
      bind pager <left> exit
      bind pager <right> view-attachments
      bind attach <left> exit
      bind attach <right>

    • Mutt is amazing... All you need is a pine muttrc file, one example is here

      http://www.dotfiles.com/files/27/263_.muttrc [dotfiles.com]

      and then check out Tesla Gwynne's muttrc for more fun:
      http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/BitsAndPieces/muttrc-1.2 [linux.org.uk]

      The online muttrc generator
      http://muttrcbuilder.org/ [muttrcbuilder.org]

      It may not win you over, but wow, mutt can be super quick to do mighty things.

  • Name change (Score:5, Funny)

    by kvap ( 454189 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @10:22AM (#21779150)
    > Why Alpine Message System (AMS)?

    Because Pine Message System sounded too whiney :)
  • Interestingly, all the "OMG GMAIL LOLZ PINE IS FOR LOOSERS" posts are all from people with UIDs greater than 850000. Coincidence?

    The kids these days...
    • Well, I'm sure we can assume that anyone with a 6 digit UID calling those with 7 digits 'kids' is merely just precotious - you're not THAT much older, kiddo... ;-)

      I'm perfectly happy with my 4 digit ID - though, yes, for a brief moment I *was* thinking about bidding on the 3digit one a few months back (auction for EFF); but then - there are less than 5k users that can claim a lower UID, so why bother...

  • Why? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by seebs ( 15766 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @10:45AM (#21779464) Homepage
    PINE was one of the most atrociously-written programs I have ever seen. It was built by people who absolutely failed to understand UNIX, at any level. It used to fail on big-endian systems that used 64-bit file offsets, because rather than using the STANDARD SYSTEM HEADERS, it manually misdefined every UNIX system call itself. Why? Because one of the programmers once saw a system, somewhere, where he claimed was wrong, so they made a consistent practice of, by default, including their own local definitions INSTEAD OF the standard system ones, except on a very few platforms that had to be specially identified.

    The whole program is like that. It's full of cargo cult nonsense, attempts to reinvent other languages in C, and so on.

    If you like the interface, the thing to do would be to start from scratch and write a program with that interface, but to do it competently, using programmers who have some basic understanding of C. If you start from the PINE base, you are doomed.
    • PINE was one of the most atrociously-written programs I have ever seen.

      And that has bearing on it's value to it's end users, how?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by seebs ( 15766 )
        (http://www.angryflower.com/itsits.gif)

        Bad code is unmaintainable code.

        Consider the end users who suffered with various PINE bugs relating to not detecting incoming mail or truncating files, due to the offset bug described. Consider all the vulnerabilities, crashes, and so on, which necessarily entail from badly-written code.

        Code style isn't purely for the convenience of programmers. Programmer convenience means more time spent actually working on the problem you're supposed to be working on, and less tim

        • Bad code is unmaintainable code.

          Given how long PINE has been around, and how easily it's evolved to changing requirements (ffs, it supports acting as a webmail client, now!), I'd say that means the original supposition (that PINE is poorly written) has been refuted, then.

          Consider the end users who suffered with various PINE bugs relating to not detecting incoming mail or truncating files, due to the offset bug described.

          Oh please. There is a ton of well-written code out there that isn't 64-bit clean.

          Consid

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by seebs ( 15766 )
            It's not just the code isn't clean, it's that it went out of its way to REVERSE the way that anyone else would have done it.

            The fact that the code had to be altered because the maintainers chose to replace UNIX headers with their own misconfigured variants IS an example of the code being unusually difficult to maintain or alter.

            Have you READ the code? I have. It's crap.
        • And, BTW, I'm fully aware of the usage of "it's" and "its"... oddly enough, I, like many others, suffer from typos. However, mine often involve homophone substitutions, particularly since I tend to write out full words before my brain has an opportunity to validate that the spelling is correct.

          • However, mine often involve homophone substitutions,
            So you're homophonic? Looks like you've been outed by a Grammar Nazi. *ducks*

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by raddan ( 519638 )
      Fortunately, most of us use PINE's commands and not its C functions.

      • Fortunately, most of us use PINE's commands and not its C functions.

        Yes, but you don't get more PINE commands unless a C programmer can figure out how to add them.

  • And of course... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Friday December 21, 2007 @10:57AM (#21779630) Homepage Journal

    Pine = Program for Internet News and Email
    Pine = Pine Is Not Elm
    Alpine = Apache Licensed Pine

    Just so you know... :-)

  • ... when there is a venerable email client installed by default in almost every O/S.

    Yes, I'm speaking of telnet.

    If god wanted you to use a GUI, he wouldn't have invented ASCII!

  • He's not dead .... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Mean Variance ( 913229 ) <mean.variance@gmail.com> on Friday December 21, 2007 @11:49AM (#21780446)
    He's pining for the fjords.

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