Re: tm & gnus

Golubev> What was really meant by stating Golubev> description "Emacs MIME support. Not needed for gnus >= 5.8.0" "tm is bad news, bad mail, bad MIME, bad Lisp, deprecated, please avoid it." Restated politely. It's actually pretty stable and usable now, but it does insinuate itself into Emacs in an irreversible way and is definitely orphaned by its author. It is bug-prone when the Emacs environment changes. Golubev> It is unlikely that gnus itself, without using tm, is Golubev> able to create full featured (multipart, with specified Golubev> encodings and so on) MIME messages. Sadly, this is false. None of the add-on MIME packages ever got out of beta, really. Before SEMI, the author of tm and later SEMI regularly sent out broken MIME using tm, and his colleagues at the Mule lab didn't use it. He then abandoned tm to develop SEMI, with the same historical pattern. So most of the major Emacs MUAs (Gnus and VM, at least, I think Mew as well) do their own MIME now, and have done so for years. Gnus 5.8.8 does better than VM 6.9x in many areas (for example, Gnus MIME-encodes headers, VM doesn't), but both do all of the necessary decoding and provide hooks for external viewers, and will encode bodies and create attachments. Gnus does at least attempt to distribute MML as a separate package within a package, but I doubt that either Kyle or the Japanese MUA authors will pick it up very soon. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Don't ask how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.