pine reply-all patch

For the impatient: Patch for Pine 4.58, 4.60 and 4.61, 4.63, 4.64
Pine source FAQ on patching pine

I use Pine as my email client, and I really like it. It’s fast, simple, full-featured, and very keyboardable. However, nothing’s perfect, even Pine.

Instead of providing separate Reply and Reply All commands, Pine has a single Reply command that asks you whether you want to reply to all. Unfortunately, as most usability experts will attest, users don’t read. Including me. So, since I often want to reply all, I’ve inadvertently trained myself to ignore the prompt and just say yes. This is bad because, as we all know, there are occasions when you most emphatically do not want to reply to all.

So, I wrote a patch to separate Pine’s Reply command into Reply and Reply All commands, which behave as expected. To patch Pine and build it, first download the Pine 4.60 source and my patch. Then, run these commands to extract, patch, and build Pine.

$ tar xzvf pine.tar.gz
$ cd pine4.60
$ patch -p0 < ../reply-all.patch.4.60
$ ./build DEBUG=-O lrh

If you download a source package other than the gzip, modify the first command accordingly. Also, if you’re not on Red Hat Linux, modify the last command accordingly. For more information on patching Pine, see Eduardo Chappa’s FAQ.

If you do try it out, please let me know!

Note: If you get compile problems with kssl.h and krb5.h when building Pine on Redhat 9, use this build command:

$ ./build EXTRACFLAGS='-I/usr/kerberos/include' lrh

In RH9, Redhat moved the Kerberos libraries and headers to /usr/kerberos. Predictably, this broke every app that compiles against SSL but not (necessarily) Kerberos. There’s a debate in the bug listing over whether to blame Redhat, packagers, or app developers…but for our purposes, the workaround above should be good enough.

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