Subject: MSDOS Port of Pine?

From: [email-masked] (Steve Traugott)
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 93 06:11:08 EST

In the Pine blurb on ftp sites, there's a mention of a port of Pine
to the MS-DOS platform being "well underway".

I'm looking for a good mail reader to port to the Waffle (an MS-DOS
UUCP package) environment, to replace Waffle's stock reader.

Does anyone know if the MS-DOS Pine port is still in progress, does
it have a projected release date, who's doing it, what sorts of
problems are they having if it's taking this long...  

I'm ready to do the port myself, but don't want to duplicate effort
nor get into something that's infeasable.  Any word on this?

Steve

---                     .        .    `   *    
Steve Traugott             `    .  *           +       [email-masked]
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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1993 08:15:24 -0800 (PST)

Steve,
PC-Pine is *still* "well underway" :)

Our best guess at the moment is that we'll have a general beta release
ready in about 4 weeks (around the ides of March :)

We *think* that release will be pretty stable, in terms of the key
functionality; in fact, it appears to be pretty stable now, but we still
need to sort out some issues on folder namespaces (especially remote
folders) and mailbox driver control. 

And yes, it was a *lot* harder than it looked.  Mostly trying to squeeze
things into a 640K address space, while still being able to deal with
arbitrarily large mailboxes and arbitrarily large MIME attachments.
(We won't talk about the weeks lost discovering and working around
Microsoft bugs...)  All of the work has been done by Mike Seibel, who has
been working on it for 7 months, at about 80 hours a week, with low-level
library support from Mark Crispin.

The functionality is equivalent to the Unix version except that it doesn't
have a spelling checker yet, plus it has a few new things that will also
show up in the next Unix version.  (Anyone have a spelling checker that is
fast and doesn't use any memory? :) It is also mouse-aware (though not a
true Windows app.) The initial release will include versions for packet
driver (based on WATTCP), Novel LWP, and PC-TCP stacks. 

-teg

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1993 11:12:09 -0800 (PST)

> library support from Mark Crispin.

The work done in c-client (which is really more like a ``kernel'' than a
``library'' these days) would make an interesting case study: how you convince
software that was written with a ``memory is cheaper than bandwidth'' frame of
mind to run on a machine where the exact opposite is true?

What ended up being done was rather clever, if I could be so immodest.  The
first step, and perhaps the least used, was the ability to purge the c-client
caches (or selected parts thereof).  I say ``least used'' because it turned
out that wasn't enough by a long shot.  There's a lesson in this for people
who think the IMAP2bis ``PURGE'' functionality is helpful.

The second step was to control the scope of the caches.  Eliminating message
text caching happened early on, along with a mechanism to pipe the data
through a routine rather than praying that it'd be a short enough (char *)
string to fit inside a 64K DOS segment.  The next to go was envelope caching;
while a big performance win it did take up a surprising amount of memory.

The final step was putting all cache management under the control of a cache
manager routine which can be overridden by the main program (and is overridden
by PC Pine).  This mechanism is amazingly flexible, and Mike has done things
with his cache manager to poor ol' c-client's data structures that I never
dreamed possible -- not to mention possibly illegal under the morality laws of
certain states.......;-)

Using the cache manager capability, a fully-functional c-client can be induced
to use no memory at all modulo temporary storage.  The result is a version of
Pine that runs competantly (if somewhat slowly) even on an XT!