OT? On Programming (was: Re: Computers for children)

From: Pete Turnbull <pete_at_dunnington.u-net.com>
Date: Sat Jan 16 11:53:36 1999

On Jan 15, 18:00, Max Eskin wrote:

> Besides for this example, what do you feel is wrong with PINE? What do
you
> prefer? I would like to know since I'm an inexperienced Linux user, and
> this is on-topic since PINE is over 10 years old.

Mostly that it has a very broken idea of how to handle dates; it insists on
parsing the date in the "From" line in order to validate it, and gets upset
if it can't. When things go wrong, it has a habit of believing that two
messages are in fact one (the one with the unparsable date being
concatenated to the preceeding one).

I also fail to see why pine, alone amongst the dozens(?) of mail programs
around, has to have a control message at the top of a mailbox: a message
which confuses anyone who subsequently uses another mailer; which gets
moved to a different place if another mailer re-sorts the mailbox (making
the control message useless to pine, which inserts another copy and
actually displays the old one); and which typically gets removed by any
POP3 server that accesses the mailbox for a remote user (so pine has to
replace it again).

It has a crazy insistence on having certain terminal capabilities in order
to work... and refuses to run if they are not detected, despite the fact
that it actually contains code to get round many of the things it claims to
need (such as clear-to-end-of-line). There are also some bugs to do with
clearing lines on terminals with a minimal set of capabilities -- notably
when going backwards and forwards from the setup and addressbook menus.
 It's possible to get pine into a state where the display is unusable until
you quit, reset the display (usually scrolling a screenful is enough,
though) and restarting.

It doesn't let you add headers other than a small set of pre-defined ones,
which are sometimes necessary -- though beginners might not need to do
that.

IMNSHO, a mail program and a news program are two different things -- and
pine's news capabilities are pretty poor.

And, of course, it's BIG. Compare the size of a pine executable to the
size of other MUAs on the same platform.

It *does* have some nice features -- but for me, both as a user and a
sysadmin, they're far outweighed by the shortcomings.

-- 
Pete						Peter Turnbull
						Dept. of Computer Science
						University of York
Received on Sat Jan 16 1999 - 11:53:36 GMT

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