Subject: Re: Multiple Pine behavior...

From: Philip Hazel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 10:53:27 +0100 (BST)

The comments about read-only versions of Pine provoked this message from 
a non-Pine-using member of our staff. I thought it worth sharing...

--
Philip Hazel                   University Computing Service,
[email-masked]             New Museums Site, Cambridge CB2 3QG,
[email-masked]          England.  Phone: +44 223 334714

---------- Forwarded message ----------

'hmm. The thing I hate most of all about Pine and many other mailers is
that you can't go in for a quick trial (not even just to read the
otherwise inaccessible documentation!) without having it trample about
all over the place.  It's specially aggravating to have it touching
your inbox. If you are already deeply committed in some other mail
world and can't afford to risk screwing it up, there's real
disincentive ever to risk trying Pine.

One possibility would be an option to force everything (er, except
stdio!) to be openned read-only; another might be a "noclobber" option,
one that guarantees never to open for writing any file that had not
been created in the same session. Doubtless some deeper thought needed.

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From: Dan Schlitt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 11:31:21 -0400 (EDT)

It would be nice if pine would respond to commands without waiting for the
inbox to open.  This is one of my main frustrations with pine.  It is
partly my fault.  I'm terribly messy and generally have a very large
inbox. (On one machine I have to keep it cleaned up a bit because I run
out of space and pine refuses to start and dumps core.  A nice reminder,
but perhaps a liitle extreme.)

I frequently want to get in to pine to do several things -- compose a
message, read a message in a folder, and then reduce the stuff in my inbox.
Even if I could get directly to the folder using a command line option it
would be a pain.  I like the nice general purpose command "pine" to get
into the program.

I think I see that there would be a programming problem to get behaviour
different than what you have now.  There is a need to wait to see that the
open returns with sucess.  But .....

/dan

-- 

Dan Schlitt                           School of Engineering Computer Systems
[email-masked]        City College of New York
(212)650-6760                         New York, NY 10031

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From: Terry Gray <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 May 1994 08:35:33 -0700 (PDT)

Philip,
It's true that --unless you open with the -o flag-- Pine will update the
status of messages you actually look at (or delete!), but an original
design goal of Pine was that it would *not* steal your inbox and "hide" it
somewhere, like some other mailers do.  That continues to be the default
behavior of Pine, although a site administrator can link in the mbox
driver or configure for mail.txt (tenex format) and lose that
characteristic. 

The rationale was exactly that mentioned by your colleague: we wanted to
make sure people could try Pine and not regret it, or switch back and
forth among mailers easily. 

-teg

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From: Barry Landy <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 May 1994 09:18:10 +0100 (BST)

> inbox to open.  This is one of my main frustrations with pine.  It is

Suggestion: set up an empty folder (in mail/ or wherever your folders 
are) and define it as your inbox; have your real inbox as a secondary 
incoming mail collection.
I do not believe that Pine will try to open the second one unless you try 
to Go there explicitly, or via TAB, or the folder list.

> but perhaps a liitle extreme.)
[several lines cut]
> (212)650-6760                         New York, NY 10031
=======================================================================
Barry Landy, Head of Systems and Development,
University of Cambridge Computing Service
[email-masked]      0223-334713   +44-223-334713

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From: Philip Hazel <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 May 1994 10:22:19 +0100 (BST)

> inbox. 

I get and send a lot of mail and have a large sent-mail folder. I want to
be able to open it read-only, mainly so that closing it near the end of the
month (when it can contain hundreds of messages) doesn't take so much time!
That is one of my main frustrations. I am often tempted to scan the folder
using an editor instead, simply to save time.