>>>> "Simon" == Simon Josefsson
<jas(a)extundo.com> writes:
Simon> (Cc redirected to xemacs-beta instead of comp.emacs.xemacs.
Simon> Btw, where does mail-lib-bugs go? Haven't seen it before.)
To you personally. :-)
Every package has a set of ï¼ xemacs.org aliases: $package-bugs,
$package-discuss, $package-patches, $package-maintainer. These go
by default to the maintainer, in this case, you. In many cases, they
go to xemacs-beta. And for complex packages like Gnus and EFS that
have their own support organizations, they go to the relevant mailing
lists.
Simon> steve(a)tleepslib.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp (Stephen J. Turnbull)
Simon> writes:
> [Aside to mail-lib maintainer: Simon, maybe we should think
> about dismembering all of the "internet" suite (gnus, vm, w3,
> etc) and incorporating their utility libraries into the
> mail-lib package?]
Simon> I started thinking about that with MIME support in
Simon> sendmail.el, but I'm not sure it is a good idea -- large
Simon> parts of Gnus is dragged into mail-lib.
Yes. This needs to be coordinated with the maintainers of the
packages affected and with GNU Emacs.
Simon> No problem with that, but it might cause some confusion if
Simon> someone (not unreasonable) wanted to think like "I need
Simon> qp.el, it's part of Gnus, so I grab the XEmacs Gnus
Simon> package". Hm. But they would need the mail-lib package to
Simon> get the gnus package to work anyway... ah, I dunno.
Exactly. We need to do something about run-time dependencies for
packages anyway. At present we mostly check _build-time_
dependencies; mostly they correspond to run-time dependencies so we
don't see many bugs. When we do, we do the wrong thing by hard-coding
a build dependency.
I guess my fundamental way of thinking here is that all the internet
library people have talked about this for years. I cracked Kyle up a
couple of years ago by reporting a bug in base64 handling. He said,
"but that's not a VM function, it doesn't have the right arguments!"
I said, "well, it may be in the w3 package, but it has your name on
it!" And it did---Bill P had borrowed Kyle's base64 package years
earlier, and since w3's needs hadn't changed, he hadn't updated it.
Gnus even has a couple of allegedly separate packages only used by
Gnus. So what I'm suggesting is that someone (you, by default) take
on the burden of doing the work to coordinate the packages so that
they can be maintained more easily. Note that in the case of Gnus,
VM, and w3, the utility libraries are nominally well-separated from
the main functionality. In practice, coordinating APIs will be a
pain, I'm sure. But in the long run I think it will be worth it.
If you don't have the resources to actually do it, it would at least
be useful to get people's views (especially yours) on why you can't do
a good job right now (== what really needs to be done to get it right)
on record. Or maybe we'll find a volunteer.
--
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.