[tech] Alpine installed on Mussel and Martello

[David Adam]

I've installed Alpine 0.999999 (yes, that's the version number) on 
Martello and Mussel.

Alpine is a Pine replacement that is being actively developed (Pine has 
not been worked on for several years) and has a number of benefits over 
its predecessor (performance is much better, it will be maintained by 
Debian developers due to an Apache-style license, it has a number of 
features not in Pine such as the use of Home and End keys).

While Alpine 1.0 has been released, it has not yet been made into a Debian 
package, and I had no real desire to do all the packaging nonsense. I'll 
wait until 1.0 is packaged for the testing version of Debian before 
backporting it.

Bearing in mind that Pine does not have a good security history and that 
it has been unmaintained for some time, I think we should consider 
removing it from UCC systems and symlinking it to Alpine at some stage 
after 1.0 is installed.

In short, if you're a Pine user (and even if you're not), then give Alpine 
a shot.

David Adam
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au