Migrating from/to PINE
----------------------

For this purpose you could use one of the special packages: 
pine-addrbk-tools, mailbox-tools, pine2mutt.

System-wide defaults that come with the package
--------------------

Some settings are added to your system-wide config file when the new 
package is installed. The intention is to show new features. If a 
user/admininistrator doesn't like any of them, he can disable them. 
Old specific settings must be left untouched by new PINE installation.
Some of the default options added are described below:

URL viewers:

"url_handler.sh"-script from the "urlview" package is used by default for 
launching browsers. Originally this package was developed for use with Mutt
mail agent.

Pruning rule

Added a rule for automatic answering questions in the beginning of a 
new month:

- Save cureent "sent-mail" to "..."
- YES
- Delete old "sent-..."
- NO

You can change this behaviour in "pruning-rule" option either in PINE 
Config menu or in one of the config files.


Coloured PINE

This PINE package adds to your system-wide config file a default colour 
scheme. Of course, any user can define another one according to his own 
taste, or disable colours at all. I do not insist on that the included 
scheme is the nicest, it's there just to show the feature.

Mikhail Zabaluev <mookid@SIGENT.RU> has remarked that using some coloured 
programs (including PINE) in Xterm on a system with ncurses 5.2 
requires certain environment settings: the colours will be seen only if
TERM=nxterm  TERM=color_xterm. ("nxterm" is an alias for 
"xterm-color".) The default value of TERM environment variable in an Xterm 
is just "xterm"; having it set, you won't see any colours in PINE. But: 
you will be able to see the background then (in Eterm) that could be nice 
as well :-). (Another ugly thing about PINE in an Xterm is that it isn't 
as wide as the terminal window.) I guess that showing colour can also 
be forced by setting a value for "color-style" parameter in PINE config 
menu (or in the config files).


Extensions
----------

The extensions are only available in Pine having an 'L' at the end of
the version number, e.g. 4.33L, 4.42L.

Recoding
--------

This version of PINE was built with Lev Levitin's <lev@mccme.ru>
extension that is basically intended to enable recoding of 
messages (between various Cyrillic charsets). 

Currently compiled in charsets can be observed in the ^Recode
PINE dialog.

(Of course, this approach isn't nice: it would be
better if the set of available charsets wasn't fixed.
Then it would be usefull not only for Cyrillic users.
Well, this is a "to-do" for a next release.)

Note that the support for Paratype-154 encoding (Asian 
Cyrillic, aka PT154) may require special version of the system C 
library (glibc): up from glibc-2.2-ipl2mdk they are built with PT154 
support (for ALT's GNU/Linux distributions).


A quick start for a user/admin to get by with Recoding:
-------------

1. Adjust your personal/system wide PINE settings. Personal settings 
can be changed by pressing S, C in the Main menu of your PINE program 
(they are stored in the file ~/.pinerc). System wide settings can be 
changed by the admin in /etc/pine.conf. Both files have almost the same 
format and are rich on comments.

  1a). Make sure you have enable-8bit-esmtp-negotiation in the 
feature-list (I guess this will never harm).

  1b). Set the character-set parameter to the appropriate value. It 
must a document charset name, not a system one. Example: koi8-r, 
windows-1251 should work; cp1251 is wrong. This parameter tells PINE 
what your console is capable of: which characters from the document it 
can show. (It looks strange that this action isn't automated, but it 
is, in fact, to one or another extent a problem of all console 
applications that deal with documents in different charsets.) It would 
be convenient for users if the administartor sets a system wide defualt 
for this parameter.

2. Enjoy the cool feature! When you're reading a message (in the View 
screen in PINE), you can press ^R (Control-R) to specify a recoding 
mechanism. "Auto" should work in most cases, but if don't get a 
correctly recoded readable document, you can try to supply manually a 
rule to the recode-module. This is done in the same menu by pressing + 
(the plus key). Setting a recoding rule can be "undone" by you afterwards
(when you move on to the next message, for instance) by pressing - 
in place of +.

3. Of course, there are other advanced options and features you can use.
More information can be found in the Release notes of your PINE 
(accessible by pressing R in the Main menu) or in the local info file 
(can be viewed from inside PINE; is located in /usr/lib/pine.info; 
that's the place for the administrator to put any additional info).

imz@altlinux.ru
ALT Linux Team
http://www.altlinux.ru/
