Re: Sending attachments

[Leo]

On 2009-07-14 11:44 +0100, Richard Stallman wrote:
> There are two reasons. First, its primary source is maintained outside
> of Emacs. Second, the people who work on it do not hesitate to add
> dependencies between one part and another, with results that one
> quickly sees on studying files from Gnus.
> 
> Another problem with Gnus maintenance is that, whenever they see the
> need for some other feature, they add it to Gnus, without discussing
> it with the Emacs maintainer, and without attempting to make the
> package independent of Gnus.
>
> Another problem is that a lot of the code is ugly and hard to
> understand. While this CAN happen to any code, I think the separate
> maintenance of Gnus encourages it, since it discourages other people
> than the Gnus developers from working on the code at all.
>
> I decided to make rfc2047.el work outside Gnus. Most of the dependence
> on other Gnus files existed for no good reason at all. However, a
> couple of functions in mm-util do real work that seems important. They
> are a specialized facility in the same file with lots of low-level
> XEmacs compatibility functions used in Gnus. Perhaps I will just split
> that file.

What Richard has said makes a lot of sense. There are different
standards on the quality of code that can be included in Emacs.
Unfortunately many think that 'it works' is the standard. Also many libs
stop developing because they have been included. We shouldn't be afraid
to recycle them if that's where they belong.

-- 
Leo's Emacs uptime: 33 days, 23 hours, 24 minutes, 49 seconds