Re: Sending attachments

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Tue, 14 Jul 2009 11:17:33 -0500 Jonathan Rockway <address@hidden> wrote: 

JR> * On Tue, Jul 14 2009, Richard Stallman wrote:

>> 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.

JR> Anyway, I think the solution is to cleanup the Gnus code as needed
JR> rather than completely rewrite it from scratch and call it something
JR> else.  I can't speak for the Gnus developers, but I'm sure they would
JR> appreciate the help.  The point of free software is that the users can
JR> improve the code; so that it works better, or so that it can be used
JR> somewhere else more generically.  Right?

(speaking as a Gnus and Emacs contributor)

Right.  I have not seen anything concrete about what needs to be fixed,
refactored, etc. in Gnus.  There aren't many developers actively
contributing to Gnus, either, so making major changes will take a long
time and needs to be well-justified.  Gnus welcomes new developers with
open hooves...er...arms, but the code complexity is probably
intimidating to most.

Pulling code out of Gnus has the downside that it then needs to be
inside Emacs, but XEmacs may not have it.  XEmacs compatibility has (as
long as I can remember) been a Gnus goal.  How should Gnus and Emacs
deal with this?  I hope "drop XEmacs support" is not an option.

Ted