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Date:	Thu, 13 May 1999 16:04:14 -0500 (CDT)
From:	Mumit Khan <khan AT xraylith DOT wisc DOT edu>
To:	Cygwin Mailing List <cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com>
Subject:	Re: Pine 4.x
In-Reply-To:	<Pine.WNT.4.10.9905122227540.-347833@aleph>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.93.990513155452.1543C-100000@modi.xraylith.wisc.edu>
MIME-Version:	1.0

On Wed, 12 May 1999, Nancy McGough wrote:

> I agree that PC-Pine 4.10 works quite well but it does not support the
> pipe command, sending filters, or display filters, and so, for
> example, you can not easily use PGP with PC-Pine. Another useful Pine
> utility to port would be mbxcvt, which is a tool for converting folder
> formats. If I were a programmer, *I* would port Unix Pine 4.10 and its
> utilities to Cygwin. If anyone wants info on setting up and optimizing
> PC-Pine, check out my page about this at:
> 
>  http://www.ii.com/internet/messaging/pine/pc/
> 
> If anyone is inspired to port mail tools, in addition to Pine, I'd
> love a port of procmail so I could use it to post-process message
> folders.
> 

Here're 3 good reasons why there's no PC/Cygwin pine port yet.

1. The build configuration scheme is truly atrocious. You have to spend
   most of the time manually diddling this and that, and all of that 
   could have been trivially automated with a little foresight. By now
   the platform config files are such as mess that it'll be a lot of work
   to get it to be managable.

2. Absolutely no thought given to software engineering whatsoever. Just
   look at how the various platforms are handled in pine, pico, c-client
   etc. Yuk.
   
3. Case study in non-portable programming constructs! Just to illustrate 
   one example, someone decided that st_size in struct stat will contain 
   something useful after you call stat on a directory. Where in the world 
   did that come from? The only reason pilot doesn't crash and burn on 
   every system is due to sheer luck -- stat fills in the actual 
   directory size on most Unix systems (I believe Cygwin sets it to 0, 
   which is perfectly legal).

Yeah, I did try it a while back when I was having trouble getting Linux to
work on my old travelling laptop. I believe I had most of it working,
except for a few glitches. If there's interest, I'll dig it out of my CVS
tree and see if I can make it go again.

Regards,
Mumit



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