Subject: Pine for the Mac

From: [email-masked] (james joseph kempf)
Date: 25 Jul 1995 14:58:55 GMT

Is anyone working on a port of Pine for the Power Macintosh? After browsing 
through the Pine homepage, it doesn't seem to be a future priority to the  
developers at Washington University. Are there any third party developers 
working on the port? Or is everyone just happy with Eudora?

Jim Kempf <[email-masked]>

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From: Guy BRAND <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 19:42:07 GMT

Hi,

> working on the port? Or is everyone just happy with Eudora?

  I don't think Pine will ever be ported to the Mac... but the developers
from CAC could probably give a final opinion concerning this subject ;-)

  To answer immediately your last question, yes Eudora can be satisfying for
a personnal use. It's a very nice and powerful program (I'm not talking about
the commercial version, but the freeware release), but it's a POP client, and
thus it's not really well suited for some special mail reading environment.
Personnaly I don't use Eudora at work, because you have no control on the
security of your mail. If you don't care about security problems than Eudora
could be good enough for you. An other "problem" with POP (rather than with
Eudora itself) is that one cannot just pick up the "desired" parts of a
multipart MIME message, you have to retrieve all the message, even if it
contains twice the same information (a part in TIFF an other in GIF for
example), but this will only be a limitation in the future applications of
email. 

  What else to say ? Eudora is handling multiple users accesses to multiple
mailboxes, but it's a bit messy if you want to access your mail using several
clients (for example a domestic client connecting through a PPP or SLIP
server, and some other clients in your office). 

  The choice has not to be made between Eudora and "something else", but
between IMAP and POP3. On the Washington Pine FTP server you can find a text
document that explains the differences between POP and IMAP paradigms. 

  Several IMAP clients are available for the Macintosh, namely Mail Drop,
Mailstrom and Iride (for the free softwares), and there are also commercial
programs. IMHO, Mail Drop, written by Carl BELL from Baylor, is the most
stable of all and sounds really promising. Release 1.1 does not provide
multiple mailbox access, but this should be possible in version 1.2 that
should be published at the end of the summer (according to Carl himself). You
can find all the IMAP clients in the public domain on Sumex's Info-Mac server
and its mirrors (look under comm/tcp/mail). 

  Hope this helps...
  BuG

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From: Mark Crispin <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Jul 1995 19:32:11 -0700

On 27 Jul 1995, Jesse Vincent wrote:
> poking around in the washington directories, i did come across c-client
> code for macintosh that came with a m-test (very basic imap client) and
> to my mild amazement, it ran! my guess is that a competent mac
> programmer could hack that together with the rest of the pine source
> tree in a few days..unfortunately, i am not such an individual...any
> takers?

It's a bit more complicated than that.

The first thing you need to do is to have some sort of window manager (at
the very least, a terminal emulator that imitates something like a VT100)
and make all of Pine's cursor positioning codes run under it.  mtest is
build using Symantec C, which provides a console window.  That'd be quite
nice; unfortunately it is a "glass teletype" (no cursor positioning).

You also need to consider memory management.  The native Mac way is like
no other system; although you can use malloc() you're really supposed to
use double-indirect pointers to permit memory shuffling.  To the Mac's
credit, there's no stupid 640K limitation like there is on DOS.

Next, you need to consider how local file management should be done.  The
routines in c-client use the Unix compatibility library in Symantec C,
which is barely adequate for the limited use it is put to (.newsrc,
.mailboxlist, and tmpfile()) by c-client.  To have local folders, you need
to write a suitable driver in c-client, and you're hampered if you use the
Unix compatibility library by the lack of things like ftruncate().  The
best thing is probably to use native Mac system calls.

A related problem is that some very basic operations (like translate a
directory number to its name) can't be done on the Mac; "don't do it that
way" is the usual answer from the Mac hackers.  Apparently they don't want
you to port programs from other operating systems to the Mac (well, gee,
they *do* say that rather explicitly in "Inside Macintosh"...).

I got as far as porting c-client, and seeing to it that the OS-indepedent
parts of Pico compile on the Mac.  At that point, I ran into a wall that
could only be bested by learning a lot more about native Mac system calls
than I had time to expend.  [I did, however, learn enough to write the
MacTCP support code.]

A Mac expert is looking into a Pine port, but there's no definite word on
its feasibility yet.

-- Mark --

DoD #0105, R90/6 pilot, FAX: (206) 685-4045  ICBM: N 47 39'35" W 122 18'39"
Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate.

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From: Jesse Vincent <[email-masked]>
Date: 27 Jul 1995 00:45:12 GMT