alpine 1.10 on AIX

[Allin Cottrell]

First question (may be relevant to the following): when you compose
mail in alpine, is the "pico" binary used, or does alpine use an
internal version of pico?

Anyway, I've lately been using Alpine 1.10 on an AIX machine, where
the pico version is relatively old (4.64?) and I'm seeing some
oddities. (I'm accessing the AIX box from Linux using ssh in
either gnome-terminal or rxvt.)

If I'm typing a message when mail comes in, and Alpine puts up a
"New message" message, the composition gets corrupted: the cursor
gets jogged onto a new line, with the same column offset as
before. I've found that when this happens the current
paragraph of the composition is basically trashed: if I delete
the whole para and start over, the message is salvageable,
otherwise there are lines of text missing.

Any ideas what could be going wrong here?

[I've been using Alpine on Linux (again, accessed remotely via
ssh) for some time and have had no such problem, but unfortunately
that Linux server won't be around for much longer.]

Allin Cottrell
Wake Forest University

[Niklaus Kuehnis]

I have Linux, not AIX. As you probably know, on Linux Alpine uses an
internal pico. No pico or nano appears on `ps ax`.

You can choose the editor in the config. Look for the string "editor"
in the config (M S C W) and read the respective online help.

HTH,
Niklaus

[Allin Cottrell]

Niklaus Kuehnis wrote:
> Allin Cottrell <cott...@wfu.edu> wrote:
>> First question (may be relevant to the following): when you compose
>> mail in alpine, is the "pico" binary used, or does alpine use an
>> internal version of pico?
>
>> Anyway, I've lately been using Alpine 1.10 on an AIX machine, where
>> the pico version is relatively old (4.64?) and I'm seeing some
>> oddities. (I'm accessing the AIX box from Linux using ssh in
>> either gnome-terminal or rxvt.)
>
>> If I'm typing a message when mail comes in, and Alpine puts up a
>> "New message" message, the composition gets corrupted: the cursor
>> gets jogged onto a new line, with the same column offset as
>> before. I've found that when this happens the current
>> paragraph of the composition is basically trashed: if I delete
>> the whole para and start over, the message is salvageable,
>> otherwise there are lines of text missing.
>
>> Any ideas what could be going wrong here?
>
>> [I've been using Alpine on Linux (again, accessed remotely via
>> ssh) for some time and have had no such problem, but unfortunately
>> that Linux server won't be around for much longer.]
>
> I have Linux, not AIX. As you probably know, on Linux Alpine uses an
> internal pico. No pico or nano appears on `ps ax`.

Ah, I should have thought of using ps. But you're right, there's no
separate 'pico' process. So incompatibility of alpine and pico is
not the issue.

> You can choose the editor in the config. Look for the string "editor"
> in the config (M S C W) and read the respective online help.

Thanks, but I'm not really interested in running an alternative editor.
I'm trying to work out what's wrong with alpine on AIX. I don't have
admin status on the AIX box, but I tried building alpine 2.00 in my
own account. This is on AIX 5.3. I guess nobody has tried building
alpine 2 on that platform. I had to fix about a dozen things before I
got it to build. When I finally got a binary, it had the same problem
as mentioned above: alpine's "New message" display trashes the
composition of outgoing mail.

If I can find the time I'll try to write up the build issues.

Allin Cottrell