Building Pine for CentOS

Pine (pine is not elm) is a curses-based local mail user agent. I have one user who has been married to it for decade and a half, and I need to keep it available for him on my Internet server(s). There is a Wikipedia article on Pine. The official site is the Pine Information Center at the University of Washington.

Running CentOS 5.2, it apparently isn't available via yum. The official pine site has a precompiled RPM, but I had trouble making it work, so I started from raw sources. I went ahead and included SSL support, since it builds imapd as well (and I need that).

yum install ncurses-devel
yum install openssl-devel
yum install pam-devel
./build SSLDIR=/usr SSLCERTS=/etc/pki/tls/certs lrh

There doesn't seem to be an installation script, or an install option in the makefile, so we will execute the following commands:

install -s -o root pine/pine pico/pico /usr/local/bin
gzip -c doc/pine.1 > doc/pine.1.gz
gzip -c doc/pico.1 > doc/pico.1.gz
install -o root doc/pine.1.gz doc/pico.1.gz /usr/share/man/man1
install -s -o root imapd/imapd /usr/local/libexec

Hmm, I have learned about the 1777 vulnerability error message from pine. What it is really complaining about is that it doesn't have permission to create a .lock file in the mail spool directory. The solution to this is apparently to install the mlock binary, supplied with pine, setgid mail. I will test this and see.

install -s -o root -g mail -m 2755 imap/mlock/mlock /usr/sbin