Re: RMAIL, MIME-related bug

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden> writes:

> Not any more.  Eli was remarking that a lot of duplicate effort could
> have been avoided if there were a standard MIME library.  AFAIK, tm
> was on offer in 1996-97, but nobody did anything about it.  Ditto SEMI
> in '97-99.  Unfortunate lack of foresight, that's all.

Well, yes and no.  When I started working on the MIME library for
Gnus, I had intended using SEMI.  However, that proved rather
difficult due to how SEMI was designed: It isn't (or wasn't at that
time) structured anything like a library.  Instead, it worked by
redefining functions/hooks in the packages it supported.  You'd
basically require the relevant SEMI packages, and Gnus/rmail/whatever
would suddenly become MIME capable.

That's a perfectly valid approach if you intend being an add-on
package with no cooperation from the packages you support, but it
makes it rather difficult to maintain things and integrate things in
a more user-friendly (and customizable) fashion.

I spent about a week looking at SEMI and trying to pick stuff out of
it, but in the end I gave up and started writing things (basically)
from scratch.

I may be misremembering, but I think Kyle went through a similar
process about the same time with vm. 

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  address@hidden * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen