[Alpine-info] compatibility question

[Benjamin R. Haskell]

On Thu, 22 Apr 2010, FHDATA wrote:


> 

> Greetings,

> 

> I know this is a bit late considering that alpine has been out for 

> some time.  But we are finally moving to alpine 2.00 from the last of 

> the pine series (4.64). We have a lot of users. Some are "old-timers" 

> and not so technical ....

> 

> I understand that essentially there are no issues going to alpine 2.00 

> from pine 4.64 but to be on the safe side ....

> 

> Question:

> Is it correct to state that generally, let say,  98% of functionality 

> of pine exist in alpine to the extent that a general  pine user does 

> not even notice (s)he is using alpine? i.e. if I symlink alpine to 

> pine would they even notice it?

> 


The biggest issues will be with differences in how non-ASCII characters 
are handled.  Pine would blindly pass off whatever text it was getting 
from the server.  Alpine tries to properly decode the text.

So, e.g. poorly-implemented mailers that send CP-1252 (Windows Latin-1 
variant) incorrectly identified as Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) may show up with 
'?' in lieu of improperly-encoded characters.

If your users are generally English-speaking users who don't use 
accented characters, chances are decent they won't notice a thing.

Still, I think I'd be reluctant to 'fake' it (i.e. don't make the 
symlink).  For the things that *do* change, it'd be better for the users 
to know why they might have changed.

-- 
Best,
Ben