• Miscellaneous
    • Can I apply more than one patch?

      Yes you can, apply them as you would normally do,but you may run into troubles. For example if you try to apply the patch that sends e-mail from the command line and the one that checks for new mail in incoming folders, the patch program will fail. The best thing you can do is to send me an e-mail explaining what you were trying to do. I will help you solve this problem.
       

      See also:
       How do I apply a patch?
      How do I know if the patch was applied correctly?
       

    • Can I suggest a patch?

      I am happy to read your suggestions, to either write a new patch or to improve an existing patch. If you would like a patch to be a permanent part of pine just write to the pine developers team pine@cac.washington.edu
       

    • Are there other resources for patches?

      Yes, there are a lot. I am trying to compile a source of patches in the web. I have come up with the this list
       

    • Why do the patches have a ".gz" extension

      Because they are compressed files. Some browsers decompress the file for you but keep the original name intact, this means that when patch "name.patch.gz" is downloaded, you will see "name.patch.gz" in your computer, but the file "name.patch.gz" is not compressed anymore.

      Not all browsers do this. Lynx is an example of a browser which will keep the file intact.

      Also, I have thought of compressing the patches even more (using bzip), but as far as I know that is not fully deployed in all systems that Pine is supported, and keeping two versions of the same patch increases the space that I am using to keep these patches, so I stick with ".gz extensions" for the moment.
       

    • Are there RPMs of Pine with these patches?

      As far as I know the answer is yes. SuSe distributes some of these patches (as patches and in RPM) and I've found someone in Debian also distributing these patches as a rpm, so if you look around, you may find a RPM for you. Gentoo Linux also distributes these patches, but not in rpm format only as patches. Brian Burns informed me that he also distributes RPMs of my patched version of Pine at http://www.sosdg.org/rpm/pine/.

    • What's the best order in which I can apply the patches myself?

      The answer is not a simple one, but when new versions of Pine appear it is handy to have such list, so I keep a list that tries to minimize the number of hunks that fail when more than one patch is applied. I am also trying to rewrite the patches so that they will minimize collisions. At this moment I am using the patch program that comes in RedHat 9.0 to do this. I hope other patch programs behave similarly. The list is in the file README.upgrade
       

      See also:
       What is a hunk?

       

    • Why do patches have context and aren't patches unified?

      This has to do with the past. When I started writing patches my diff program could not create a unified patch, the "-U" option was not available and attempts to build a newer diff program failed. However, the patch program understood the -U option. This was in a TRU64 machine, which was very old, so I decided that context was a more viable option, because of the clarity and support by other programs. I guess now I am stuck with my choice.