This effort started in October 1999 when I was a student at the Mathematics Department in the University of Washington. The first patch was the one that helped me write foreign characters in an email message. I did not actually did this for me, I did it for some visitors to the Mathematics Department from Finland. I actually wrote the patch because I had a sending filter in Pine, which allowed me to write a message as one wrote Latex, but since the filter had some bugs, and I could not see the output before it was sent, I had to do the Latex-style input before the message was sent.

After I released my first patch, a few more followed. I added a patch a week for about a month. Maintenance was not very hard, since Pine evolved very slowly, and this gave me time to fix bugs and release updated versions. Eventually, two of them followed: fillpara and rules. The former was requested by a computing support person in the Department, while the later was a request from too many people and me.

Originally, I submitted my first patch to the Pine team, but their lack of interest in it (no reply) made me realize that I should not be writing patches for Pine for later inclusion, but write them for those that would be interested in them, and so Patches for Pine became a project by itself, independent of upstream. Since my intention was to help others do more with Pine, this project had enough justification to continue. After all, that is how it started in the first place.

Eventually, as the site grew, I realized how difficult it was to do some basic operations, such as updating the site between releases of Pine, or integrating them into one big patch (all.patch), so this required me to script this part of the process, and I wrote scripts (and later a C-program, for speed) to do this. I eventually ended up creating more scripts that add text to the release notes, and that create each of the web pages in this site, and that create all.patch (including overcoming failures in patching). Eventually this made a huge difference into how I maintain this site, since there was no difference between maintaining a page with 10 or 60 patches. The solutions I had created scaled nicely, and now it made it easy to concentrate only on writing patches.

I started embracing new technologies, and eventually added a feed for my web site; in it I announced that this web site would be discontinued since the Mathematics Department had announced my account would be closed. By a mistake of one of the readers of the site, the announcement made it all the way to slashdot. Many people contacted me as a result, offering to host the site, and mirrors were created. One of the people that decided to help came from Computing and Communications at the University of Washington.

At the end of 2006, this site moved to be hosted by Computing and Communications at the University of Washington, where it was hosted free of charge until April 2011. Here happened the transition from Pine to Alpine.

One of the problems that I had using a remote shell was that the automake tools that Alpine required were not available in the machine I was connecting to, so after some effort, I could install them. The pain it took to do some basic development was big enough that I did not want to do this again. Programs like autoconf would not run, and even in my own personal computer running OpenSuSe, they would not work ideally, so anything that would depend on autotools, was met with resistance from my part. I was happy that I did not have to do this more than once.

Eventually, we all received the bad news that Alpine would be discontinued, and later that my site would be discontinued, again I had to find a new host. In between these two events, re-alpine was born. I joined that project, and was involved in it, added some small contributions, but then it was decided (without consultation) to change the build system in the snapshot, which made it impossible for me to build re-alpine (and hence test my contributions). Since I had already gone through a painful experience with autotools and I did not have the full power to change them (without reducing even further how much work I could do developing re-alpine), I asked for this change to be reversed (I could have reversed it, but I wanted to get to a concensus), but was met with resistance, and since I was not willing to go through this process again (because it consumed time and my limited available quota at UW), I had to depart from the project, since it was not possible for me to do any development. At that time, my main platform for developing Alpine was the resource given to me at UW, so my ability to keep my work going was determined by the resources I had available there. I determined that it was not possible to do any more re-alpine development, and since there was no will from other developers in re-alpine to accomodate my request, I took the obvious decision to leave the re-alpine project. There was a reverse back to the old build system after I left the project; however, this did not change my mind, because I did not see the willingness to discuss and agree about changes (nor do I still see it, I see more a I am the boss, you the employee approach, which does not suit my personality, I am more of a <ket us work in a team" type of person). Notice that I was the only person at that time who had provided any contributions at all, so I found it strange that they were not listening to my problem. At this time I am not involved with the re-alpine project, nor plan to be involved again on it.

After the hosting of this site was concluded at UW, I had to find a new host. I spent a lot of time trying to find the right place for my patches. I had to do a lot of research, particularly reading the agreement statements. I found many places that would require me even to give the copyright of my contributions away to them, or that did not give me enough flexibility as to how I would control each page in the site (e.g the look of the page). Therefore, after this site was closed at UW it was not hosted by anyone else for about a month.

Currently this site is hosted by www.000webhost.com. I thank them for hosting this site free of charge. I did an extensive search before I decided to sign up for this service, and I found this to be the best free service. I highly recommend it. Give it a try!

Follow the links on the left to get patches for Pine and/or Alpine.