Audits and vetos [was: Issues outstanding, redux (summary)]

Stephen> o Audit for synchs and feature additions that don't work Stephen> with Mule (eg, people have patched/intend to patch Stephen> smtpmail and ps-print in ways that cause data loss and Stephen> other wastage under Mule) APA> smtpmail: APA> Steve, please don't limit yourself to vetoing and auditing. I don't. My message that you cited still has 3.5 days left in my deadline, OK? Getting this right is not an easy thing; mail is a bitch, and I'm not a mail specialist. Nor is Mule trivial, at least I know something about that. And I never heard of smtpmail until Simon's patch the other day, let alone looked at it. Testing it will be time-consuming, as I have never explicitly specified a mailer backend for xemacs before; I'll have to figure out how to do that. Not to mention coming up with a few test cases. APA> I have offered to patch smtpmail as per your recommendation. Adrian, I don't know when the current version of smtpmail was checked in or by whom, but it is BROKEN. Not after Simon's patch. The one currently being distributed in mail-lib. Any attempt to send non-ISO-8859-1 characters by smtpmail as it stands will turn every single one of them into a tilde, to the best of my knowledge. The fact that we haven't had any bug reports about it leads me to hope that I've analyzed it incorrectly. Still I am unwilling to approve a patch until I have reason to believe it doesn't make things worse than they already are. Adding features that would attract users to the package is making things worse, unless there are some safeguards put in place to keep it from doing harm. The patch you proposed to ps-print would do a similar thing for printing from Mule; at least ps-print would merely waste paper. The point is not any particular patch; it's just random luck that the two cases I know of right now are these two. But surely there are more of these in the code base by now. I don't review every patch for Mule implications; maybe I should have, and I'll start trying to do more, but EVERYTHING on xemacs-patches is a LOT of traffic. Auditing for this kind of thing is necessary for a release. People will be VERY angry if they lose mail because of this. APA> ps-print-nomule: APA> I almost have a patch for ps-print-nomule ready. I am not APA> qualified to work in the mule version. And it will be reviewed for Mule implications even though it is nominally "non-Mule," and it will be vetoed if it causes problems if invoked from a Mule XEmacs. At which point if other reviewers feel that the benefits of the patch to non-Mule users outweigh the problems for Mule, the veto will be overridden. That's the way the process is supposed to work. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."