On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Dr Andrew C Aitchison
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Over the years I've found that my opinions of what makes for
> "good" and "bad" netiquette are heavily influenced by features
> of my message (mail or news) reader.
>
> SL5 doesn't add many packages to those supplied by TUV, but one
> of them is pine/alpine.
>
> pine is not good at threading, which means that pine users don't really
> understand when some people complain when people take an unrelated
> message, reply to it and change the subject.

I wrote the early SunOS ports for pine, and did some early Linux
testing. Don't *get* me going on the Pine SSL historical support
issues. Just.... don't.. But there were a number of long-standing
issues, such as the poor integration with the included IMAP daemon,
that caused endless trouble. And pine's licensing is... funky, and its
code base has not been updated in 6 years.

I'd say it's no longer safe to use: if you need it, you an grab the
SRPM's from the "Penguin Liberation Front" at http://plf.zarb.org/.
Their SRPM's are Mandriva based, but they publish tools that are
useful but which our favorite upstream vendor would be unable to
publish. (Pine is one of them, due to funky licensing, and libdvdcss
is another, which I used when in the EU.)