PINE problem

[Bret Busby]

Hello.

I do not know whether this list still works, but, as this is a problem
relating to PINE, and not to ALPINE, I am posting this query to this
list.

I am using PINE 4.64; from what I understand, the last stable (or,
relatively stable) version of PINE.

Today, when I tried to run PINE, after it performing its archiving, it
collapsed, with the returned error;

"Problem detected: "Received abort signal(sig=11)".
Pine Exiting.
"

Of course, like much of available software, the error message is
meaningless to a simple user.

In trying to run it with debugging flags, I looked at the man entry for
PINE, and found

"-d debug-level Output diagnostic info at debug-level (0-9) to the
current .pine-debug[1-4] file. A value of
0 turns debugging off and suppresses the
.pine-debug file.

-d key[=val] Fine tuned output of diagnostic
messages where "flush" causes debug file writing without
buffering, "timestamp" appends each message
with a timestamp, "imap=n" where n is between 0
and 4 representing none to verbose IMAP
telemetry reporting, "numfiles=n" where n is between 0
and 31 corresponding to the number of debug
files to maintain, and "verbose=n" where n is
between 0 and 9 indicating an inverse
threshold for message output.
"

Without clearly uinderstanding that, and, without clearly understanding
the required syntax, I first tried running

pine -d

That did not work, so, I tried

pine -d verbose=5

and I got

" pine -d verbose=5
Argument Error: unknown flag "d", debugging not compiled in
"

What does the error that causes PINE to crash, mean, and, why did PINE
suddenly stop working without crashing, and, what needs to happen, to
get PINE working without crashing, again?

Please do not reply with "get rid of PINE and install ALPINE", as I am
familiar with PINE, and I do not know that ALPINE will work the same,
with the many folders and filters and other things implemented, and,
changing software can in itself, cause problems.

I have just subscribed to the list, using an alternative email address
that uses webmail and not PINE, and I will have to be using that email
address until I find the resolution of the problem.

Thank you in anticipation

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A Trilogy In Four Parts",
written by Douglas Adams,
published by Pan Books, 1992

....................................................

[RobertHoltzman]

On Mon, Feb 01, 2010 at 01:53:23PM +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
............snip.............

Post by Bret Busby
Please do not reply with "get rid of PINE and install ALPINE", as I am
familiar with PINE, and I do not know that ALPINE will work the same,
with the many folders and filters and other things implemented, and,
changing software can in itself, cause problems.

When I switched from Pine to Alpine, Alpine not only used my existing
~/.pinerc file but it used my existing ~/mail directory with all its
existing 30+ mail files.

As far as your being familiar with Pine, you won't be able to tell the
difference. Layout, commands, etc are the same.

[Bret Busby]

Post by RobertHoltzman
............snip.............

Post by Bret Busby
Please do not reply with "get rid of PINE and install ALPINE", as I am
familiar with PINE, and I do not know that ALPINE will work the same,
with the many folders and filters and other things implemented, and,
changing software can in itself, cause problems.

When I switched from Pine to Alpine, Alpine not only used my existing
~/.pinerc file but it used my existing ~/mail directory with all its
existing 30+ mail files.
As far as your being familiar with Pine, you won't be able to tell the
difference. Layout, commands, etc are the same.
--
Bob Holtzman

I have several hundred folders, at least two hundred filters, many with
screens of values, and, my mail directory shows with du -sh, as taking up
9.1GB. I am subscribed to somewhat over a hundred mailing lists, and am the
registered list administrator of about 25 mailing lists.

Using the <Page Down> key, to scroll through the list of mail directories,
it takes 170 key presses, with a 17" monitor, so the estimate, if that is 40
lines displayed per page, is about 6800 directories, under the mail
directory. If it is only 30 lines per screen, displayed, then it is still
5100 directories. I have just counted, and 41 lines of listed directories
are displayed, per screen. As the paging down, places the second-last line
on one screen, at the top of the next screen, I believe that it works out to
40 distinct lines listed, per screen.

In the circumstances, as it took me, how ever many years ago, quite a while
to end up with PINE as the only email application that could satisfactorily
handle what I wanted, I am quite wary about changing the email application.

A couple of years ago, when I did a Debian system upgrade, I lost about 20
years of genealogy research, which I have to sometime try to find whether I
can recover, if I can get a previous computer working again. And, the data
being lost, occurred in the backup procedure.

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010, Bret Busby wrote:

BB> Today, when I tried to run PINE, after it performing its archiving, it
BB> collapsed, with the returned error;

Bret,

You are in big trouble, for several reasons. For one, even if you
figured out what is making Pine crash, you need to report this to the
person that built Pine from source (it seems that you are using Pine in
Debian. Debian does not support Pine, since it is nonfree).

If you are still thinking of using Pine, my advice is that you build it
by yourself, reconfigure it with your old configuration and hopefully
everything will work again as it should. The only difference between the
Debian Pine and the UW Pine is that the former uses a non-stable Maildir
patch, while the latter does not. However, configuration files,
directories, etc. differ between the two, so you will have to have some
patience to reconfigure everything for it to work (maybe using an
alternate .pinerc, that is a copy of the original, will help).

Having said all this, there is a version of Alpine for Debian, which does
not have Maildir support. If you need Maildir support, you can patch it
yourself.

In your case I really recommend you to try to find a way to upgrade to
Alpine (incrementally, if you think that's better). I do not see much
future in trying to get support for Pine today.

If you get a clean version of Pine that can be used to reproduce the
problem, you will have to run Pine under gdb, and send the output of the
"bt" command, so that we can take a look what your problem is.

I hope this helps a bit.

[Bret Busby]

Post by Eduardo Chappa
BB> Today, when I tried to run PINE, after it performing its archiving, it
BB> collapsed, with the returned error;
Bret,
You are in big trouble, for several reasons. For one, even if you
figured out what is making Pine crash, you need to report this to the
person that built Pine from source (it seems that you are using Pine in
Debian. Debian does not support Pine, since it is nonfree).
If you are still thinking of using Pine, my advice is that you build it
by yourself, reconfigure it with your old configuration and hopefully
everything will work again as it should. The only difference between the
Debian Pine and the UW Pine is that the former uses a non-stable Maildir
patch, while the latter does not. However, configuration files,
directories, etc. differ between the two, so you will have to have some
patience to reconfigure everything for it to work (maybe using an
alternate .pinerc, that is a copy of the original, will help).
Having said all this, there is a version of Alpine for Debian, which does
not have Maildir support. If you need Maildir support, you can patch it
yourself.
In your case I really recommend you to try to find a way to upgrade to
Alpine (incrementally, if you think that's better). I do not see much
future in trying to get support for Pine today.
If you get a clean version of Pine that can be used to reproduce the
problem, you will have to run Pine under gdb, and send the output of the
"bt" command, so that we can take a look what your problem is.
I hope this helps a bit.
--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/
_______________________________________________
Pine-info mailing list
http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/pine-info

Does alpine flush messages from the INBOX, as it filters them?

I have just rerun pine and its filters, by accident (by logging in,
instead of bypassing the login; bypassing the login would have taken
me dirtect to the folders), and, it reran the filters, copying but not
moving the messages to the folders by flushing them as it filtered
them, and, apart from now having multiple copies of the messages in
the folders, I have about13MB of messages remaining in the INBOX, so I
have had to stop fetchmail on our mailserver.

This failure to flush messages from the INBOX, as they are filtered,
has been a long running problem with pine, and, if it is not fixed in
alpine, then alpine would appear to be not much better than pine.

fetchmail flushes messages as it downloads them, so, if it crashes
during a download, multiple copies should not be downloaded.

Similarly, if pine, and, alpine, flush(es) messages as they are copied
to the folders into which they are filtered, then the effects of
crashes, would not be as bad.

To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.

[Eduardo Chappa]

On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, Bret Busby wrote:

BB> Does alpine flush messages from the INBOX, as it filters them?

No, filters have never worked that way. You can, however, expunge those
messages using the "X" command.

BB> I have just rerun pine and its filters, by accident (by logging in,
BB> instead of bypassing the login; bypassing the login would have taken
BB> me dirtect to the folders), and, it reran the filters, copying but not
BB> moving the messages to the folders by flushing them as it filtered
BB> them, and, apart from now having multiple copies of the messages in
BB> the folders, I have about13MB of messages remaining in the INBOX, so I
BB> have had to stop fetchmail on our mailserver.

I am not quite sure what your problem is. You reported a crash. Is that
gone?

Duplication of filtered messages has always been a trouble (both in Pine
and Alpine) due to the way filtering is designed. You might want to know
that you can only reduce the amount of filtered messages by enabling


Features =
[X] move-only-if-not-deleted

in each filter as appropriate.

If you have access to Fetchmail and procmail, you might want to use that
for filtering instead. It is a better solution.

[Bret Busby]

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Eduardo Chappa
BB> Today, when I tried to run PINE, after it performing its archiving, it
BB> collapsed, with the returned error;
Bret,
You are in big trouble, for several reasons. For one, even if you
figured out what is making Pine crash, you need to report this to the
person that built Pine from source (it seems that you are using Pine in
Debian. Debian does not support Pine, since it is nonfree).
If you are still thinking of using Pine, my advice is that you build it
by yourself, reconfigure it with your old configuration and hopefully
everything will work again as it should. The only difference between the
Debian Pine and the UW Pine is that the former uses a non-stable Maildir
patch, while the latter does not. However, configuration files,
directories, etc. differ between the two, so you will have to have some
patience to reconfigure everything for it to work (maybe using an
alternate .pinerc, that is a copy of the original, will help).
Having said all this, there is a version of Alpine for Debian, which does
not have Maildir support. If you need Maildir support, you can patch it
yourself.
In your case I really recommend you to try to find a way to upgrade to
Alpine (incrementally, if you think that's better). I do not see much
future in trying to get support for Pine today.
If you get a clean version of Pine that can be used to reproduce the
problem, you will have to run Pine under gdb, and send the output of the
"bt" command, so that we can take a look what your problem is.
I hope this helps a bit.
--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/
_______________________________________________
Pine-info mailing list
http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/pine-info

Does alpine flush messages from the INBOX, as it filters them?
I have just rerun pine and its filters, by accident (by logging in,
instead of bypassing the login; bypassing the login would have taken
me dirtect to the folders), and, it reran the filters, copying but not
moving the messages to the folders by flushing them as it filtered
them, and, apart from now having multiple copies of the messages in
the folders, I have about13MB of messages remaining in the INBOX, so I
have had to stop fetchmail on our mailserver.
This failure to flush messages from the INBOX, as they are filtered,
has been a long running problem with pine, and, if it is not fixed in
alpine, then alpine would appear to be not much better than pine.
fetchmail flushes messages as it downloads them, so, if it crashes
during a download, multiple copies should not be downloaded.
Similarly, if pine, and, alpine, flush(es) messages as they are copied
to the folders into which they are filtered, then the effects of
crashes, would not be as bad.
To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.
--
Bret Busby
................

Oh, and, one thing that I forgot to mention in that last message; I
sat and watched pine while it was running, to see where it crashed.

It went through the filtering, then displayed "filtering done", and
then promptly crashed. It is as if it suddenly realised it had the
megabytes to flush, decided it was too much, and "gave up and went
home".

This could have been avoided (?) if pine had functioned properly, and,
flushed mesages as it filtered them, perhaps at the conclusion of each
filter, so that, if it copied 24 messages to a folder, in the running
of a filter, as soon as that filter concluded, before moving to the
next filter, it flushed the messages that were copied. It would also
be more efficient, as subsequent filters would not be running over the
same messages that had alraeady been copied by the filter.

If alpine has this functionality, then it would definitely be worth
the move, with the expense and the work required, and the
inconvenience of the move.

[Matt Ackeret]

Post by Bret Busby
To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.

This makes no sense. Why can't you compile, or get someone else to compile,
alpine to run on your existing computer?

[Bret Busby]

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby
To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.

This makes no sense. Why can't you compile, or get someone else to compile,
alpine to run on your existing computer?

The way that I have described, ensures that what I have at present, is
not lost as with previous data, as I have described.

It is parallel implementation, which is the only way to protect
existing data and the existing system.

Post by Matt Ackeret
From looking at the Debian package repository search facility, alpine

exists for Debian 5.0, that I am currently using, but, if I simply
install it over the pine that I am currently using, and things go
wrong, I stand to lose alot.

[Matt Ackeret]

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby
To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.

This makes no sense. Why can't you compile, or get someone else to compile,
alpine to run on your existing computer?

The way that I have described, ensures that what I have at present, is
not lost as with previous data, as I have described.
It is parallel implementation, which is the only way to protect
existing data and the existing system.

Post by Matt Ackeret
From looking at the Debian package repository search facility, alpine

exists for Debian 5.0, that I am currently using, but, if I simply
install it over the pine that I am currently using, and things go
wrong, I stand to lose alot.

So (1) back up your data, (2) install alpine, and if it for some
reason doesn't work for you, use your backups.

[Bret Busby]

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby
To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.

This makes no sense. Why can't you compile, or get someone else to compile,
alpine to run on your existing computer?

The way that I have described, ensures that what I have at present, is
not lost as with previous data, as I have described.
It is parallel implementation, which is the only way to protect
existing data and the existing system.

Post by Matt Ackeret
From looking at the Debian package repository search facility, alpine

exists for Debian 5.0, that I am currently using, but, if I simply
install it over the pine that I am currently using, and things go
wrong, I stand to lose alot.

So (1) back up your data, (2) install alpine, and if it for some
reason doesn't work for you, use your backups.

The thing is that, at present,
1. I have reasonable confidence that, apart from not flushing the
messages from the INBOX as they are filtered, and thence downlloading
multiple copies of messages, pine seems to be kind of working, and
2. I have an idea that the files that I need to backup, are the whole
of the mail directory (through all of its subdirectories, however many
gigabytes I previously specified, which would not fit on a single
DVD), and the .pinerc file, but I am not sure whether those are the
only files (and directory hierarchies) that I would need to backup,
and
3. It was during a previous backup procedure, for a Debian system
upgrade (Iam not sure, but it may have been from 3.1 to 4), that I
lost 20 years of research.

Thus, the parallel implementation method, appears to be the only
(relatively) safe option.

Oh, a further note - It occurred to me last night, that this problem
occurred on the first day of this month, being the day that the
archiving of folders that are to be archived, occurs. I believe that
the folders that are supposed to be archived, were archived, but, I
cannot be sure that that process completed successfully.

I assume that pine does not generate a log file of transactions,
and/or a log file of error messages, like fetchmail does.

[Bret Busby]

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby
To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.

This makes no sense. Why can't you compile, or get someone else to compile,
alpine to run on your existing computer?

The way that I have described, ensures that what I have at present, is
not lost as with previous data, as I have described.
It is parallel implementation, which is the only way to protect
existing data and the existing system.

Post by Matt Ackeret
From looking at the Debian package repository search facility, alpine

exists for Debian 5.0, that I am currently using, but, if I simply
install it over the pine that I am currently using, and things go
wrong, I stand to lose alot.

So (1) back up your data, (2) install alpine, and if it for some
reason doesn't work for you, use your backups.

The thing is that, at present,
1. I have reasonable confidence that, apart from not flushing the
messages from the INBOX as they are filtered, and thence downlloading
multiple copies of messages, pine seems to be kind of working, and
2. I have an idea that the files that I need to backup, are the whole
of the mail directory (through all of its subdirectories, however many
gigabytes I previously specified, which would not fit on a single
DVD), and the .pinerc file, but I am not sure whether those are the
only files (and directory hierarchies) that I would need to backup,
and
3. It was during a previous backup procedure, for a Debian system
upgrade (Iam not sure, but it may have been from 3.1 to 4), that I
lost 20 years of research.
Thus, the parallel implementation method, appears to be the only
(relatively) safe option.
Oh, a further note - It occurred to me last night, that this problem
occurred on the first day of this month, being the day that the
archiving of folders that are to be archived, occurs. I believe that
the folders that are supposed to be archived, were archived, but, I
cannot be sure that that process completed successfully.
I assume that pine does not generate a log file of transactions,
and/or a log file of error messages, like fetchmail does.
--
Bret Busby
................

Oh, and, in checking, I do not have enough space on the hard drive on
this system, to do the backup.

I have slightly less than a GB free, in the home partition, and, not
enough elsewhere, for the mail directory hierarchy.

This computer is from the time when computers came standard with 80GB
HDD capacity.

[David Morris]

Surely you have off system backup for all of this data of great concern?

If not it should be worth your while to simply purchase a USB external
hard drive and the use rsync to make a copy... In fact, with the current
cost of very large drives, you can also create a backup of your whole
80GB drive.

If your system doesn't include USB ports, a 2nd internal drive is a
simple alternative.

What I do when I want to experiment is purchase a new hard drive of the
same or larger size (appropriate type of SATA or PATA, generally must
match). Then carefully make an image copy to the new drive,
something like:
dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
^^^ ^^^ might be hda and hdb, etc
then disconnect the original drive and, making jumper settings as
needed, connect the new drive as the only drive and boot the
system. It should come up exactly as before.. play with alpine
and verify that it works ... if it fails just swap back.

A. to avoid mail loss make sure your local postfix et al is not
running or the system is not connected.
B. probably helpful if you download alpine before you make the copy
so you don't have to connect to the network to acquire alpine.

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Matt Ackeret

Post by Bret Busby
To install and use alpine, to replace pine, the only way that I can
see of doing it, is buying a new computer, and building a new system,
with alpine instead of pine, then copying all of the mail folders and
the .pinerc file, to the new system, in addition to my web browsers'
data (bookmarks, etc), and, it would be such a waste, if the same
problem persists within alpine.

This makes no sense. Why can't you compile, or get someone else to compile,
alpine to run on your existing computer?

The way that I have described, ensures that what I have at present, is
not lost as with previous data, as I have described.
It is parallel implementation, which is the only way to protect
existing data and the existing system.

Post by Matt Ackeret
From looking at the Debian package repository search facility, alpine

exists for Debian 5.0, that I am currently using, but, if I simply
install it over the pine that I am currently using, and things go
wrong, I stand to lose alot.

So (1) back up your data, (2) install alpine, and if it for some
reason doesn't work for you, use your backups.

The thing is that, at present,
1. I have reasonable confidence that, apart from not flushing the
messages from the INBOX as they are filtered, and thence downlloading
multiple copies of messages, pine seems to be kind of working, and
2. I have an idea that the files that I need to backup, are the whole
of the mail directory (through all of its subdirectories, however many
gigabytes I previously specified, which would not fit on a single
DVD), and the .pinerc file, but I am not sure whether those are the
only files (and directory hierarchies) that I would need to backup,
and
3. It was during a previous backup procedure, for a Debian system
upgrade (Iam not sure, but it may have been from 3.1 to 4), that I
lost 20 years of research.
Thus, the parallel implementation method, appears to be the only
(relatively) safe option.
Oh, a further note - It occurred to me last night, that this problem
occurred on the first day of this month, being the day that the
archiving of folders that are to be archived, occurs. I believe that
the folders that are supposed to be archived, were archived, but, I
cannot be sure that that process completed successfully.
I assume that pine does not generate a log file of transactions,
and/or a log file of error messages, like fetchmail does.
--
Bret Busby
................

Oh, and, in checking, I do not have enough space on the hard drive on
this system, to do the backup.
I have slightly less than a GB free, in the home partition, and, not
enough elsewhere, for the mail directory hierarchy.
This computer is from the time when computers came standard with 80GB
HDD capacity.
--
Bret Busby
................
_______________________________________________
Pine-info mailing list
http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/pine-info

[Bret Busby]

Post by David Morris
Surely you have off system backup for all of this data of great concern?
If not it should be worth your while to simply purchase a USB external
hard drive and the use rsync to make a copy... In fact, with the current
cost of very large drives, you can also create a backup of your whole
80GB drive.

I have an external USB HDD for backups.

I think it was a WD Elements one.

It doesn't work anymore. Useless heap of rubbish.

[Robert Holtzman]

Post by Bret Busby

Post by David Morris
Surely you have off system backup for all of this data of great concern?
If not it should be worth your while to simply purchase a USB external
hard drive and the use rsync to make a copy... In fact, with the current
cost of very large drives, you can also create a backup of your whole
80GB drive.

I have an external USB HDD for backups.
I think it was a WD Elements one.
It doesn't work anymore. Useless heap of rubbish.

And you never replaced it?

So I assume from this that you have no external backup? If so, what do
you back up to, the internal hard drive? If so, in the event of a
corrupted drive....there goes your backup.

Get a USB drive and back up your *entire* system before you do anything
else.

[Robert Holtzman]

Post by David Morris
Surely you have off system backup for all of this data of great concern?
If not it should be worth your while to simply purchase a USB external
hard drive and the use rsync to make a copy... In fact, with the current
cost of very large drives, you can also create a backup of your whole
80GB drive.
If your system doesn't include USB ports, a 2nd internal drive is a
simple alternative.
What I do when I want to experiment is purchase a new hard drive of the
same or larger size (appropriate type of SATA or PATA, generally must
match). Then carefully make an image copy to the new drive,
dd bs=1M if=/dev/sda of=/dev/sdb
^^^ ^^^ might be hda and hdb, etc
then disconnect the original drive and, making jumper settings as
needed, connect the new drive as the only drive and boot the
system. It should come up exactly as before.. play with alpine
and verify that it works ... if it fails just swap back.
A. to avoid mail loss make sure your local postfix et al is not
running or the system is not connected.
B. probably helpful if you download alpine before you make the copy
so you don't have to connect to the network to acquire alpine.

............snip............

I must be missing something here. What would be wrong with simply making
a copy of his mail directory named mail.bak or Maildir.bak depending on
which he's using, downloading Alpine and running it? It will pick up his
existing ~.pinerc and read his mail. After he knows it functions he
deletes the backup mail folder and he's done. If it doesn't work he or
corrupts his mail he reinstalls Pine, deletes the corrupted mail, renames
his backup mail directory and is back where he started. What am I missing?
This assumes he has the Pine binary on his system or in his backup to
reinstall. What am I missing?

[Bret Busby]

Post by Eduardo Chappa
BB> Today, when I tried to run PINE, after it performing its archiving, it
BB> collapsed, with the returned error;
Bret,
You are in big trouble, for several reasons. For one, even if you
figured out what is making Pine crash, you need to report this to the
person that built Pine from source (it seems that you are using Pine in
Debian. Debian does not support Pine, since it is nonfree).
If you are still thinking of using Pine, my advice is that you build it
by yourself, reconfigure it with your old configuration and hopefully
everything will work again as it should. The only difference between the
Debian Pine and the UW Pine is that the former uses a non-stable Maildir
patch, while the latter does not. However, configuration files,
directories, etc. differ between the two, so you will have to have some
patience to reconfigure everything for it to work (maybe using an
alternate .pinerc, that is a copy of the original, will help).
Having said all this, there is a version of Alpine for Debian, which does
not have Maildir support. If you need Maildir support, you can patch it
yourself.

I believe that I need maildir.

Post by Eduardo Chappa
From memory, postfix, which is the application that we use, rather

than sendmail, which I understand requires a person to be a "dark arts
guru" to set up and maintain, uses maildir, so I di a google search on
postfix and maildir together, and found, on the web page at
http://www.postfix.org/faq.html ;

"POP or IMAP problems
Postfix is a mail delivery system. Postfix does not implement services
such as POP or IMAP to read mail. Several POP/IMAP implementations
exist that can cooperate with software such as Postfix.

Examples of software that is used successfully with Postfix:

* Cyrus IMAP implements IMAP, POP3, and KPOP, later versions also
support TLS. This software implements its own private mail database
system. Not for beginners.

* Courier-Imap provides POP3 and IMAP, and supports access over
SSL. This software supports the maildir-style mailbox format only (one
message per file, same format as qmail)."

Regarding me performing actions like compiling alpine, or, patching
it, I simply do not have the skills and experience, or, the
confidence, to perform these actions.

I have not compiled Linux kernels or applications; I simply download
and install them as required, and, occasionally, as required,
configure the settings, when I am able.

[Bret Busby]

Post by Bret Busby

Post by Eduardo Chappa
BB> Today, when I tried to run PINE, after it performing its archiving, it
BB> collapsed, with the returned error;
Bret,
You are in big trouble, for several reasons. For one, even if you
figured out what is making Pine crash, you need to report this to the
person that built Pine from source (it seems that you are using Pine in
Debian. Debian does not support Pine, since it is nonfree).
If you are still thinking of using Pine, my advice is that you build it
by yourself, reconfigure it with your old configuration and hopefully
everything will work again as it should. The only difference between the
Debian Pine and the UW Pine is that the former uses a non-stable Maildir
patch, while the latter does not. However, configuration files,
directories, etc. differ between the two, so you will have to have some
patience to reconfigure everything for it to work (maybe using an
alternate .pinerc, that is a copy of the original, will help).
Having said all this, there is a version of Alpine for Debian, which does
not have Maildir support. If you need Maildir support, you can patch it
yourself.

I believe that I need maildir.
From memory, postfix, which is the application that we use, rather
than sendmail, which I understand requires a person to be a "dark arts
guru" to set up and maintain, uses maildir, so I di a google search on
postfix and maildir together, and found, on the web page at
http://www.postfix.org/faq.html ;
"POP or IMAP problems
Postfix is a mail delivery system. Postfix does not implement services
such as POP or IMAP to read mail. Several POP/IMAP implementations
exist that can cooperate with software such as Postfix.
* Cyrus IMAP implements IMAP, POP3, and KPOP, later versions also
support TLS. This software implements its own private mail database
system. Not for beginners.
* Courier-Imap provides POP3 and IMAP, and supports access over
SSL. This software supports the maildir-style mailbox format only (one
message per file, same format as qmail)."
Regarding me performing actions like compiling alpine, or, patching
it, I simply do not have the skills and experience, or, the
confidence, to perform these actions.
I have not compiled Linux kernels or applications; I simply download
and install them as required, and, occasionally, as required,
configure the settings, when I am able.
--
Bret Busby
................

[Bret Busby]

Forwarded to the list, as the Reply did not default to the list.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bret Busby <***@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 12:33:58 +0800
Subject: Re: [Pine-info] PINE problem

Post by Eduardo Chappa
BB> Today, when I tried to run PINE, after it performing its archiving, it
BB> collapsed, with the returned error;
Bret,
You are in big trouble, for several reasons. For one, even if you
figured out what is making Pine crash, you need to report this to the
person that built Pine from source (it seems that you are using Pine in
Debian. Debian does not support Pine, since it is nonfree).
If you are still thinking of using Pine, my advice is that you build it
by yourself, reconfigure it with your old configuration and hopefully
everything will work again as it should. The only difference between the
Debian Pine and the UW Pine is that the former uses a non-stable Maildir
patch, while the latter does not. However, configuration files,
directories, etc. differ between the two, so you will have to have some
patience to reconfigure everything for it to work (maybe using an
alternate .pinerc, that is a copy of the original, will help).
Having said all this, there is a version of Alpine for Debian, which does
not have Maildir support. If you need Maildir support, you can patch it
yourself.
In your case I really recommend you to try to find a way to upgrade to
Alpine (incrementally, if you think that's better). I do not see much
future in trying to get support for Pine today.
If you get a clean version of Pine that can be used to reproduce the
problem, you will have to run Pine under gdb, and send the output of the
"bt" command, so that we can take a look what your problem is.
I hope this helps a bit.
--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/
_______________________________________________
Pine-info mailing list
http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/pine-info

I have just installed alpine on my laptop, on Debian 5 (my pine
installation is on another computer; my desktop). In looking at the
alpine .pinerc file, the file has its own inline documentation, as
opposed to the contextual help facility in the pine .pinerc file.

Can it be done, that a user renames the mail directory hierarchy (eg,
to pinemail), and .pinerc (eg, to .pinerc-pine), then intalls alpine,
renamed the pinemaildirectory hierarchy to mail, and then imports the
.pinerc settings into the alpine .pinerc file, so that the settings
from the original .pinerc file, are preserved into the new alpine
.pinerc, but the alpine .pinerc inline documentation, is also
preserved in the file?
--
Bret Busby
................

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

Post by Bret Busby
I have just installed alpine on my laptop, on Debian 5 (my pine
installation is on another computer; my desktop). In looking at the
alpine .pinerc file, the file has its own inline documentation, as
opposed to the contextual help facility in the pine .pinerc file.
Can it be done, that a user renames the mail directory hierarchy (eg,
to pinemail), and .pinerc (eg, to .pinerc-pine), then intalls alpine,
renamed the pinemaildirectory hierarchy to mail, and then imports the
.pinerc settings into the alpine .pinerc file, so that the settings
from the original .pinerc file, are preserved into the new alpine
.pinerc, but the alpine .pinerc inline documentation, is also
preserved in the file?

I think your making this harder on your self than it needs to be Bret.
Since your concerned with potentially losing some of your existing mail
messages, installing alpine to the laptop instead of the desktop (where I
presume the existing messages are stored) is a good idea. This way you can
see for yourself how alpine works without risking those messages. {Though if
you care about them you really should try to replace that bad usb drive and
back them up!}

But since your talking about renaming your pine "mail directory hierarchy"
I presume that you also have existing messages on the laptop. If the laptop
has room to COPY rather than renaming the "mail directory hierarchy" it
would serve as a back-up just incase somehow alpine does what I'm sure it
won't, and corrupts or loses some of your messages.

I'm thinking that by inline documentation you must be talking about
commented lines in the .pinerc, such as:

# Reflects capabilities of the display you have.
# If unset, the default is taken from your locale. That is usually the right
# thing to use. Typical alternatives include UTF-8, ISO-8859-x, and EUC-JP
# (where x is a number between 1 and 9).
display-character-set=

Since I initially started alpine with a copy of my existing .pinerc
file I never saw the default one that alpine would have generated.
Thus I was unaware that it no longer includes this by default???

But If you simply leave a "COPY" of the "good" .pinerc in place when you
run alpine, it should leave the existing commented lines alone when it updates
it. At least as many times as I've copied my .pinerc to a new installation, it's
always appeared to keep the existing comments for me.

[Robert Holtzman]

Post by Bret Busby
Can it be done, that a user renames the mail directory hierarchy (eg,
to pinemail), and .pinerc (eg, to .pinerc-pine), then intalls alpine,
renamed the pinemaildirectory hierarchy to mail, and then imports the
.pinerc settings into the alpine .pinerc file, so that the settings
from the original .pinerc file, are preserved into the new alpine
.pinerc, but the alpine .pinerc inline documentation, is also
preserved in the file?

Your over thinking the situation. As I suggested in a previous post,
*copy*, not rename, your mail directory to mail.bak. You don't have to
copy .pinerc. Delete Pine, install Alpine and run it. If it works, and
it will, delete the mail.bak directory and your good to go.

[Bret Busby]

Post by Robert Holtzman

Post by Bret Busby
Can it be done, that a user renames the mail directory hierarchy (eg,
to pinemail), and .pinerc (eg, to .pinerc-pine), then intalls alpine,
renamed the pinemaildirectory hierarchy to mail, and then imports the
.pinerc settings into the alpine .pinerc file, so that the settings
from the original .pinerc file, are preserved into the new alpine
.pinerc, but the alpine .pinerc inline documentation, is also
preserved in the file?

Your over thinking the situation. As I suggested in a previous post,
*copy*, not rename, your mail directory to mail.bak. You don't have to
copy .pinerc. Delete Pine, install Alpine and run it. If it works, and
it will, delete the mail.bak directory and your good to go.
--
Bob Holtzman
Key ID: 8D549279
"If you think you're getting free lunch,
check the price of the beer"

It is a bit difficult to copy 9GB into 970MB.

--

Bret Busby
................

[Pierre Frenkiel]

Post by Bret Busby
It is a bit difficult to copy 9GB into 970MB.

I can't imagine how you can live without any backup for so precious files:
According a long experience, the 2 computer parts which most often fail
are the power supply and the disks...
As it was already said here, you can purchase nowadays very cheap
external drives (for example a 60 Go Seagate for about $60), or at
least a 16 Go usb pen drive.

for testing purposes, it has not been mentionned that a good
solution, if you don't have or don't want to use an other computer,
is to use a virtual machine(virtualbox is perfect for that, and don't
needs too much resources (I run it on an old laptop with 512 Mo of RAM)

you also mentionned that the left/right arrow don't work to
change levels: they work for me (alpine version 2.0 on Karmic)

[Bret Busby]

On 04/02/2010, Bret Busby <***@gmail.com> wrote:

<snip>

Post by Bret Busby
I have just installed alpine on my laptop, on Debian 5 (my pine
installation is on another computer; my desktop). In looking at the
alpine .pinerc file, the file has its own inline documentation, as
opposed to the contextual help facility in the pine .pinerc file.

<snip>
I have remnamed my .pinerc file and my mail directory on my desktop,
and tried to install alpine.

After a couple of hours ( we have a problem with a bodgy ISP, and the
data transmission speed has gone from ADSL speed to dialup speed) of
tiome to download and install the two packages, I got the following
error;

"E: /var/cache/apt/archives/alpine_1.10+dfsg-3_i386.deb: trying to
overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/rpload.1.gz', which is also in package
pine
"

and so the installation apparently did not complete.

So, what now?

[Bret Busby]

Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 23:48:28 +0800
Subject: Re: [Pine-info] PINE problem
<snip>

Post by Bret Busby
I have just installed alpine on my laptop, on Debian 5 (my pine
installation is on another computer; my desktop). In looking at the
alpine .pinerc file, the file has its own inline documentation, as
opposed to the contextual help facility in the pine .pinerc file.

<snip>
I have remnamed my .pinerc file and my mail directory on my desktop,
and tried to install alpine.
After a couple of hours ( we have a problem with a bodgy ISP, and the
data transmission speed has gone from ADSL speed to dialup speed) of
tiome to download and install the two packages, I got the following
error;
"E: /var/cache/apt/archives/alpine_1.10+dfsg-3_i386.deb: trying to
overwrite `/usr/share/man/man1/rpload.1.gz', which is also in package
pine
"
and so the installation apparently did not complete.
So, what now?

Well, I have removed pine, and reinstalled alpine, and renamed my mail
directory to mail, and renamed my .pinerc file to .pinerc, and ahve run
alpine, and it seems to work (mostly).

I have lost the functionality of using the left and right cursor contol
keys to go up and down levels and out to the main menu, and have to use
the < and > keys, which is an unfortunate loss in functionality.

Oh, and, when I ran alpine the first time, after running the filters
until the first appearance of "filtering done", it then archived about
three or four files, so that I assume that pine had crashed during the
archiving at the first time it was run this month.

Anyway, as I am no longer using pine, and am now using alpine, and I
have been and am subscribed to the alpine list, I will shortly
unsubscribe from this list.

So, "so long and thanks for the fish", and, "we may meet again on the
other side" ( - the alpine list).

--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............

"So once you do know what the question actually is,
you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A Trilogy In Four Parts",
written by Douglas Adams,
published by Pan Books, 1992

....................................................

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

Post by Bret Busby
Well, I have removed pine, and reinstalled alpine, and renamed my mail
directory to mail, and renamed my .pinerc file to .pinerc, and ahve run
alpine, and it seems to work (mostly).
I have lost the functionality of using the left and right cursor contol keys
to go up and down levels and out to the main menu, and have to use the < and >
keys, which is an unfortunate loss in functionality.

Bret: From the main menu type "SCWEnable Arrow Navigation"

Then change this combination of settings:

[X] Enable Arrow Navigation (default)
[X] Enable Arrow Navigation Relaxed (default)

To this:

[X] Enable Arrow Navigation (default)
[ ] Enable Arrow Navigation Relaxed

And your left/right arrow keys should rigidly map to the </> functions.

See you on the other side!

[Bret Busby]

Post by Joe(theWordy)Philbrook

Post by Bret Busby
Well, I have removed pine, and reinstalled alpine, and renamed my mail
directory to mail, and renamed my .pinerc file to .pinerc, and ahve run
alpine, and it seems to work (mostly).
I have lost the functionality of using the left and right cursor contol keys
to go up and down levels and out to the main menu, and have to use the < and >
keys, which is an unfortunate loss in functionality.

Bret: From the main menu type "SCWEnable Arrow Navigation"
[X] Enable Arrow Navigation (default)
[X] Enable Arrow Navigation Relaxed (default)

That I had already.

Post by Joe(theWordy)Philbrook
[X] Enable Arrow Navigation (default)
[ ] Enable Arrow Navigation Relaxed
And your left/right arrow keys should rigidly map to the </> functions.

And that appears to have definitely fixed the problem.

Thank you for that.

Post by Joe(theWordy)Philbrook
See you on the other side!

Until we meeet again...