Re: Bugs in xemacs' rmail, flim, mel, and vm
Simon-
Thanks for the near-instantaneous reply!
* Problems with rmail & tm
--------------------------
Xemacs rmail comes with mime-handling enabled via tm. This
- blows up on babyl messages that *aren't* mime messages
- blows up on babyl messages that *are* mime messages, in
a different way.
So if you run xemacs rmail on an rmail file, you are guaranteed to lose.
Is anyone maintaining RMAIL for XEmacs at all? TM is not maintained
and is obsolete and deprecated up-stream AFAICT. It smells bit-rot
long way to me.
Ahh, that explains a lot.
Some of tm's mime-handling capability is provided by a file
mel.el. It
turns out that there are *two such files* in the xemacs system:
/usr/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/lisp/flim/mel.el
/usr/lib/xemacs/xemacs-packages/lisp/tm/mel.el
They are not functionally identical. Package-loading finds & loads
the first. It blows up. The second works.
This is RedHat's fault. There is no official FLIM package in XEmacs.
Report it to RedHat.
Thank you, Red Hat.
Fixes: One of two things needs to be done
- Fix the rmail/tm interaction
- Provide rmail mime support from an alternate, non-tm package
I have stumbled over an emacs-mime.info node describing an alternate
mime-handling system that appears to packaged with gnus. Perhaps rmail
could be shifted over to that?
Actually, RMAIL in Emacs can use Gnus' Emacs-MIME for composing, and
using it for viewing is on the todo list. Currently it implements
hooks for MIME viewing, for a third party package RMAIL-MIME.
I just tried out rmail-mime, which seems to come in the semi package.
I couldn't get it to work with xemacs rmail.el -- it needs FSF rmail.el.
For example, it calls (rmail-toggle-header 1) to set the babyl msg header
to a known state, but xemacs' rmail-toggle-header blows up if given an arg
(the FSF version accepts an optional arg).
To check the xemacs files, I bypassed Red Hat and directly downloaded a copy of
ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-21.4/xemacs-21.4.10-src.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.xemacs.org/pub/xemacs/xemacs-21.4/xemacs-21.4.10.tar.gz
from the Xemacs site. But these tarballs don't contain files like rmail.el
or the semi/ package, so I don't really know where to go to check.
In any event, it looks to me like FSF is paying more active attention to
rmail.el and you might oughtta steal their code.
* Problems with vm
------------------
Okay, let's consider abandoning xemacs's non-functional rmail+tm system
and trying to read babyl files with vm.
If you have any energy left to try another MUA, checking if you can
get your babyl files to work in Gnus is another option. I have no
idea if the Gnus babyl support is up to snuff, but I will try to
assist if you get any direct elisp errors.
At this point, the right thing seems to be:
- Properly interface rmail to whatever the approved, well-engineered
chunk of mime hackery is in xemacs.
Rmail is the long-time, standard emacs mail system, as documented in
the manual for forever, and ought to be maintained just for the sake
of (a) simplicity and (b) all those old mail files out there.
- Tweak vm to fix its babyl support.
VM seems pretty clean and thoughtfully done. It has a ton of code
in it to handle babyl. Given all that work, it ought to go ahead and
make it correct -- it's pretty close as it is.
-Olin