Bug#933: Pine wants to post my email reply, and other problems
>Are you suggesting that it is the responsibility of the pine installation
>to determine which of the various mail-delivery-agents is in place and
>then properly configure pine for that agent? I don't think so!
This is a non-issue. The location of the mail transfer agent is fixed
under Debian (/usr/sbin/sendmail); the command-line semantics are by
implication fixed as those of sendmail. (This is how I interpret
mailers.txt anyway.)
>>Consider the case where the sysadmin is installing Pine at a user's
>>request, and does not know how to set the NNTP server or have the time
>>to find out.
>How is the above script going to help him?
It'll ask them what the NNTP server is. It will then set it. At no
point does the sysadmin have to know that /etc/pine.conf is the file
to edit. I don't see the motivation behind your question here.
>>Consider the case where the end user has limited technical knowledge.
>Then he probably shouldn't be trying to post to news groups.
Why on earth not? This is ludicrous. How does your reasoning fail to
disallow users with limited technical knowledge from sending mail?
(i.e. what is the difference between mail and news which means that
one ought to have some level of technical knowledge to post news, but
not to send mail?)
>>I've spent two years using Pine, as it happens, and while I now use
>>other programs to read my mail I still use Pine when I am forced to
>>because someone has sent me a MIME mail message.
>
>If pine were fixed on this issue, would you still be able to do that?
Yes.
If Pine is fixed to do sensible things when sending mail then,
assuming the person who fixes it is sane, its operation when reading
mail will be entirely unchanged. Or have I misunderstood you?
[by `this issue' I assume you mean Pine's habit of BASE64-encoding
plain text.]
>It is exactly for historical compatability issues that I argue that
>this is not a bug but a feature.
If someone sends me mail that is BASE64-encoded, or includes
BASE64-encoded attachments, then *I cannot read it without using
Pine* (or some other MIME-enabled mailer. The point is that this set
does not include all mailers.)
Pine BASE64-encodes things when it is *not necessary* for it to do so
- attachments may be quoted-printable, 7bit or 8bit as well, for
instance, and would *still work* when read in a MIME-enabled mailer.
Therefore Pine prevents me from reading mail when it is entirely
possible for it to do otherwise.
How can this *possibly* be a feature, or indeed anything other than a
bug?
The whole world is *not* MIME-compliant and I'm fairly confident that
this will still be the case in the year 2000.
>>Ian is a sysadmin of a system which has users who use Pine, although
>>he does not use it himself. Therefore its bugs are of interest to
>>him.
>>
>>In any case, bugs are bugs independently of who reports them.
>>
>That was certainly not the point I was trying to make,
Then I don't understand the point you were trying to make. I'm sorry.
--
Richard Kettlewell
http://www.elmail.co.uk/staff/richard/ richard@uk.geeks.org
Take the longest day/Waste it all away
I can't stand it/But I can't do anything
Reply to: