Re: Sending attachments

[Stefan Monnier]

>> I may need to maintain Emacs again; past history shows other
>> maintainers come and go.  If that happens, I want to have Mail mode,
>> not depend on something that is part of Gnus.

>     Please explain why you consider "part of Gnus" to be
>     a negative attribute.

> 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.

I'm sure they'll appreciate help in reducing dependencies between modules.

> 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.

Actually, they originally did make a specific effort to make
message-mode independent from Gnus so that it can replace mail-mode.
And then mail-mode stayed and so message-mode evolved under the pressure
of nothing else than 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 don't know about you, but I'm a lot more afraid of CC-mode's code than
of Gnus's.  If you agree with that and following your reasoning, we
should have kept the old c-mode.el.


        Stefan