Re: Sending attachments

[Richard Stallman]

    > 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.

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.