Subject: pine-debug messages

From: [email-masked] (Ashish S. Nadkarni (CVD))
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 11:28:01 +0500

respected,
	i have installed the solaris executable version of pine 3.91 on our machine.whenever any user uses pine 4 files by the names of pine-debug-* get created and generally eat up space.however this does not happen on linux pine3.91.
	could you please let me know why this happens and whether it can be fixed ie stop creating those files?

ashish nadkarni
scanning tunneling microscopy lab
dept.of physics
university of pune,pune,INDIA.
[email-masked]

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From: Ed Greshko <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 19:17:12 +0800 (GMT)

> 	could you please let me know why this happens and whether it can be fixed ie stop creating those files?

	You can start pine with -d0 and no debug files will be produced.
The alternative is to recompile with the appropriate changes.

	Ed

Edward M. Greshko                       Technical Manager, Electronic Commerce
                                        Control Data Asia/Pacific Region
Voice: +886-2-715-2222 x287             6/F, 131 Nanking East Road, Section 3
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From: kremžská HOŘČICE <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Mar 1996 14:24:17 +0200

> > 	i have installed the solaris executable version of pine 3.91 on our ma$
> > 	could you please let me know why this happens and whether it can be fi$

    You may want to break your text at around 70 characters, because not
everyone can see every word of your long lines.  On this subject, a new
feature of Pine lets you ^Justify the text to which you are responding and
it will reformat the quoted text to fit into short lines, more or less...
I didn't do it because I have an attitude and a point to make.  :-)

> The alternative is to recompile with the appropriate changes.

    If you compile disabling debugging, then you will never get the debug
files no matter how you start Pine.  This has caused me much hair loss
trying to figure out the source of problems that the debug files might
have been able to help -- until 3.92, the SGI Pines were compiled by
default with debugging disabled.

    Better, from a SysAdmin point of view, is to alias pine to pine -d0
(don't write debug files).  Then if one has need to make use of debug
files, there are two options --
Start pine as \pine (enables default debugging)...
another possibility is, which is undocumented but useful:  from the Main
menu screen, typing a number sets the debugging level to the number you
type.  So, if you want to reproduce a bug you've found and get detailed
information about what happens, go to the Main menu, type 9 (or similar),
and then recreate the bug.  The debug file will have the needed detail at
that point.

    These debug files are harmless, they are rotated so you have no more
than four at any given time, and they can be invaluable when you have
problems, so unless you really are short on diskspace, I suggest you not
recompile Pine to disable debugging.

Barry Bouwsma, convicted of Pine debuggery
Radio Praha