On Sat, Feb 09, 2002 at 05:51:17PM -0800, Patrick Kirk wrote: > [snip] > > > I remember pine is only available as source due to licensing issue and > > removed from binary distribution. If I were desparate, I might download > > source package and compile. (Which I believe comes with pico.) > > > > But, I will recommend you to move to "mutt" if you used "pine" or > > "elm". As for "pico", install "nano". > > > so what is non-free for if it doesn't cover things like pine? > > Nano is fine btw - I'm just asking out of curiosity now.
Sometime ago there was a feverish discussion why pine can't be in non-free as binary. It turns out that the license of pine prohibits distribution of a binary that was produced as a result of changing the source code. For a debian package to exist, we must add at least /debian directory in the source together with all the dependencies in there. This is a change to the source code. So we can't distribute the binary... You can get the sources, go into the pine source directory, type "debian/rules binary" and you'll end up with .deb of pico and pine in the parent directory. IMO, it's stupid for pine to have a license like that but that's life. I don't use it any more. I find mutt to have more features I like :) Regards, Adam
