Re: socks.el to be included?

[Richard Stallman]

It appears that socks is useful, so I have nothing against installing it,
supposing the legal situation is ok.

    The most recent version I've found is located on savannah, under the w3
    project. Copyrights seem to be OK (assigned to FSF, authors are Bill
    Perry and Dave Love).

If it says in the file that those are the authors, that is not
necessarily the case.  Often the main authors don't update such lists
when they accept contributions from others.

So we need to make sure that they really ARE the only authors, or find
out who else did contribute and DTRT.

    url-gw.el does autoload socks.el. Tramp 2.1 does it also for gateway
    methods.

Lisp code in Emacs should not try to use Lisp files which are not part
of Emacs.  So each of those uses of socks constitutes bugs.  Those
calls to socks should not have been installed while socks was not part
of Emacs.  It seems inevitable that Emacs 22.1 will contain these bugs,
and that bothers me.

If we can fix the bugs by installing socks, that's fine.  But we need
to make sure that is legally ok (see above).  If we can't fix the bugs
that way, we have to fix them by changing url-gw.el and Tramp not to
use socks.