Discussion with Pine developers & Debian Issues
** NOTE: The Pine developers wanted to give me a new message to quote/post
publicly -- after waiting for a month for this message, and having
requested it numerous times, I've decided to go through anyhow **
Hi,
I've been in touch with the Pine developers at U Washington (U Dub)
recently, and it seems they're willing to put in some effort to allow Pine
to run on Debian Linux out-of-the-box. What they're not willing to do is
implement wider changes, but simply the minimum necessary to get it to
run.
While some might say, "Well, we'll need to distribute changes to the
source like we do now anyhow." (which is correct) -- it at least means
that there's less to do whenever a new Pine is released and that people
aren't reliant upon the Debian people to release an upgraded version, but
rather they can compile it themselves.
Comments? Thoughts?
--
Brock Rozen brozen@torah.org
Director of Technical Services (410)358-9800
Project Genesis http://www.torah.org/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 1999 08:53:21 -0800 (Pacific Standard Time)
From: Terry Gray <gray@cac.washington.edu>
To: Brock Rozen <brozen@torah.org>
Cc: Pine Support <pine@cac.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: Change of Pine folder methods in 4.10 -- PROBLEM
Brock,
We are attempting to work something out with a fellow who claims to be the
Pine maintainer for Debian... but so far his only intent has been to try
to get UW to give up change control on redistributed copies of Pine, so I
don't know whether he is actually interested in trying to solve the
problem.
Certainly we are... indeed one of the options I outlined that keeps
getting ignored is to work with us to try to identify the *minimum* set of
changes needed to run on Debian for possible inclusion in our
distribution.
As Mike said, this probably won't happen in the very short term, but we
really are interested in trying to make Pine more readily available to the
Debian community, even in spite of the presumptuous demands to change our
licensing policies we keep getting from certain parts of it.
-teg
On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Brock Rozen wrote:
> On Tue, 9 Feb 1999, Michael Seibel wrote:
>
> > > Another question, while I've got you on the line. ;-) Is there any plans
> > > on incorporating a Debian Linux port into the main release? I know that
> > > the main release doesn't compile perfectly. If you want, I can put you in
> > > touch with the Debian Linux maintainer of Pine.
> >
> > Probably not in the short term. We reviewed their diffs quite awhile back
> > after they asked to be able to redistribute, and while there's nothing of
> > immeditate technical difficulty, we're not prepared to support or directly
> > recommend the setgid environment they chose for email client use.
>
> Hmmm...it does leave a sticky situation for Debian users. There's no
> possibility of including their changes only for a build that done
> specifically for Debian? What about a possible change of license that
> allows them to redistribute (with permission) a modified version only to
> make it work. Right now, for instance, I can't compile the
> released-sources on a Debian system.
>
> Thanks,
>
>
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