Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 77197
Pine does not understand UTF-8
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:07 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: Pine does not understand UTF-8. If you select Finnish language, you will get following content in /etc/sysconfig/i18n file: LANG="fi_FI.UTF-8" SUPPORTED="en_GB.UTF-8:en_GB:en:fi_FI.UTF-8:fi_FI:fi" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16" Pine doesn't like this, see attached pictures. You need to enter this in that file, so that Pine will work correctly in Finland: LANG="fi_FI.UTF-8" LC_CTYPE="fi_FI@euro" SUPPORTED="en_GB.UTF-8:en_GB:en:fi_FI.UTF-8:fi_FI:fi" Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Select Finnish language 2. Use pine Actual Results: See pine-actual-results.png Expected Results: See pine-expected-results.png Additional info:
Created attachment 83206 [details] Actual results
Created attachment 83207 [details] Expected results
Working settings for Finland: LANG="fi_FI.UTF-8" LC_CTYPE="fi_FI@euro" SUPPORTED="en_GB.UTF-8:en_GB:en:fi_FI.UTF-8:fi_FI:fi" SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16" So you don't need to modify SYSFONT as far as I know. I am sorry, it wasn't on original report.
You're correct. Pine does not understand UTF-8. That isn't a bug however. It just isn't a supported feature of PINE. The pine team is aware of this, and hopefully will add support for UTF-8 to PINE in the future. It is something that _must_ be done by the pine team if it is to ever be supported in Red Hat Linux however. We won't engineer UTF-8 support on our own and support it. In addition, pine is not true open source software. Closing NOTABUG
Correct: it is Pine's developers issue to add Unicode support. I know that Pine is not licensed with GPL. Yet, I do not know any better program for email. Do you know? I don't like mutt, althought is the politically correct program for email. No, I can't use Evolution via ssh. I use programs, not the licenses. As far as the license is free (as beer) for me, it is good. I am looking forward to see GPL:ed clone of Pine. As soon as it appears and works as good as Pine, I'll start using it. I want to enjoy, I'll leave the pain of developing such replacement to other people who are willing to bear the agony in sake of greater good. Irrational argument is that Linus uses Pine. ;-) Anyway there is work around: LC_CTYPE="fi_FI@euro"
No, I don't know any better program for email. I use pine myself exclusively, and have used it since 1994. I've yet to find a program that has all of the features of pine that I use. I've tried mutt, and every other possible email client also and they all fall far short of pine for my needs - despite what some other people prefer who like mutt/gnus/whatever. So yes, I agree that pine is a fantastic mailer, and I use it because of that, despite the license being evil. That's how I got stuck maintaining the package in the distribution after all. ;o) Don't hold your breath on a GPL clone of PINE though. I've got a bit of history there as well by trying to resurrect the GNU mana project. It is very extremely unlikely that a GPL clone or fork of PINE will ever materialize at this point simply because pine - despite its horrible license, is useable as is, and is maintained. The legal issues with the GNU mana fork are possible to overcome, but at this point nobody is really interested in doing it or forking out cash for legal. So, I'll continue to use pine, and I'll continue to maintain the rpm package, either inside or outside of Red Hat Linux. However, due to the licensing of pine, I will never spend time coding new features or enhancements to pine. I'll only ever spend time hacking on pine to resolve security issues that come up, or severe bugs that mandate erratum. Any other issues that are reported against pine, I'll defer to upstream pine developers. For now, the best thing to do is start pine with a non UTF-8 locale.
Perhaps, RedHat wouldn't get involved in patching Pine to make it better support UTF-8. Nonetheless,you might be interested in my patch to Pine to make it a better I18Nized mail program. I tried to convince the Pine team that iconv(3) is widely available (either libiconv or vendor-supplied one), but they'd not want to use it favoring their own converters. When are they gonna make it a truly I18Nized MUA? I don't know. In the mean time, mutt has come a long way and its I18N support is fantastic although having used Pine so long, I wouldn't return to elm-like interface of mutt (before Pine, I had used elm, but...) Anyway, for details on my patch, see http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/2002-07/msg00012.html I've been using my patched version of Pine 4.44 under UTF-8 terminal and it's been working well as a text-mode multilingual MUA. It still needs a lot of works, but if you can live with a bit strange cursor movement (because Pine is still based on 'one byte per char. model), it's not so bad. Needless to say, this can't be tolerated if you use the default pico as your editor. You'd better use a UTF-8-capable editor like Vim. Bernhard Kaindl kindly ported my patch to newer Pine 4.53 and I put up his patch at http://jshin.net/i18n/pine4.53.iconv.patch
pine was deprecated in the Red Hat Linux release notes. It is something that is going to be removed, and so it doesn't make sense to make enhancements to it that we then must maintain on our own. Please make all pine related feature and enhancement requests directly to the University of Washington. the only modifications that pine will receive in the future are security fixes in all distribution releases that currently support pine. Thanks.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 91232 ***
The Pine is dead. Long live the Pine.