Re: rfc2047.el dependencies on mm-util.el

[Richard Stallman]

    I'm not familar with those functions, but they don't look particularly
    unclear to me.

If you can manage to understand them, can you please add comments explaining
their code clearly?

    > Only part of mm-utils.el is closely related to rfc2047.el.  That part
    > is what I am talking about here.  It consists of the two functions
    > mm-find-mime-charset-region and mm-charset-to-coding-system, and their
    > subroutines and data.

    They're used in other places as well (basically to encode message
    bodies), so they don't really belong to rfc2047.el.

I would not say they "belong to" it, but they are closely related to
it.

    > I am going to move rfc20457.el outside Gnus to make it a regular part
    > of Emacs.

    It's been part of Emacs since Emacs-21.

I am going to make it a regular part of Emacs -- no longer part of Gnus.

      And I don't think you can
    prevent the Gnus maintainers from distributing rfc2047.el along
    with Gnus.

I have no wish to stop them.  I'm concerned with what's in Emacs.  How
Gnus is distributed outside of Emacs is not the issue.

      This requires separating them from the rest
    > of mm-utils.el which will remain inside Gnus.  It also requires making
    > them clean and understandable.

    Rather than focus on code-ownership, I'd rather we focus on this latter
    part: "clean and understandable".

Part of making them clean and understandable is making the code not
depend on Gnus.

This won't stop Gnus from using these facilities.  It could use them
just as it uses any other Emacs facilities.

    Maybe one way to look at it is to split mm-utils.el into a part that
    deals with compatibility between different Emacsen
    (e.g. mm-string-to-multibyte) and the other that provides actual
    functionality (e.g. mm-find-mime-charset-region).

That could be the first step.  Then the next step is to make the
second part clear and independent of Gnus.

    I'm still wondering why someone would want to do that since it seems
    pretty far from the goal of improving the user's experience.

The goal is to move rfc2047.el outside of Gnus so that other parts
of Emacs can use it without using Gnus.