[CLUE-Tech] my beloved pine and pico

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Thu, 05 Feb 2004 12:11:55 -0700
Mike Staver <staver at fimble.com> wrote:

> I'm trying to use Fedora Core 1 today... and I'm very disappointed to 
> see that Pine was dropped from the release due to some kind of license 
> dispute. (I swear, if all the liceneses would just get along, linux 
> would be sooo much better!) Anyhoo, I now would like to find a 
> replacement for both command line email and my text editor.  Pico was 
> great - I learned it 11 years ago on Solaris, and I never looked back. 
> I know of emacs and vi, but vi seems hard to use for me.  Without 
> starting a flame war, can someone please let me know which email client 
> and text editors you think are the best... and most likely to not get 
> dropped from a future Red Hat / Fedora release?  Thanks.

I belive the MUA of choice for RH/Fedora would be Mutt, if you're
looking for a text-mode client. Mutt can be configured to act more or
less like Pine in conjunction with the Nano editor, which is a GNU
replacement for Pico. It's not a perfect replacement, but it will do in
a pinch, and you might find that you like Mutt a bit more when you
explore all the other stuff it can do. 

There's no "license dispute" really -- Pine has always had a rather
restrictive license. It allows redistribution, but if I recall
correctly, you cannot redistribute Pine with any modifications in source
or binary form -- which usually means that it is necessary to distribute
Pine as-is, or to distribute it in source code form and require the user
to compile it with patches to get it to work correctly. I think Debian
distributes pine in source-code only with patches that have to be
applied after the fact for it to work on Debian -- a few years ago I was
using a Debian system and wanted to use Pine, which required quite a few
gyrations to get it set up. 

Best,
Zonker
--
"A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, 
less good when they obey and acclaim him, worse when they 
fear and despise him. Fail to honor people and they fail 
to honor you. But of a good leader, when his work is done, 
his aim fulfilled, they will say, 'We did this ourselves.'" 
~ Lao-Tzu