Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com; run by ezmlm Sender: cygwin-owner AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com X-Authentication-Warning: modi.xraylith.wisc.edu: khan owned process doing -bs Date: Thu, 13 May 1999 16:04:14 -0500 (CDT) From: Mumit Khan To: Cygwin Mailing List Subject: Re: Pine 4.x In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII 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 -- Want to unsubscribe from this list? Send a message to cygwin-unsubscribe AT sourceware DOT cygnus DOT com