On Sun, 8 Jun 2003, Josko Plazonic wrote: > First, you seem not to be aware of how pine and imapd are being > distributed with many operating systems. Most linuxes build and > distribute them separately - they are therefore not using exactly the > same code base and there are no shared libraries involved so you can > build pine and imap separately in any way you prefer.
I am aware of how Pine and imapd are distributed in many Linux systems. However, I expect that people who are competant enough to customize Pine and imapd would get the authoritative (and current) sources from the UW FTP site, and that only novice users who want a binary-only install would rely upon third-party RPMs with unknown hacks. Substantial problems have occurred when you run Pine and imapd that were not built from the same code base, including interoperability problems. Although different versions of unmodified UW software should interoperate (we're pretty careful about this!), third-party hacks have been known to cause serious problems. I recently wasted many hours (days, actually) in chasing an interoperability problem that was caused by a certain Linux vendor's "improvement" in the c-client library. That "improvement" rendered all programs with that "improvement" non-interoperable with those which did not have it. The result was trashed mail files. Because of such support issues, I strongly recommend that nobody run a Pine and imapd binary on the same machine that were not built from the same code base. Since Pine helpfully incorporates the IMAP toolkit (including imapd), this can be inferred as my saying "use the imapd that you built when you built Pine." -- Mark -- http://staff.washington.edu/mrc Science does not emerge from voting, party politics, or public debate. Si vis pacem, para bellum.
