Re: using qp.el, rfc2047.el in mailutils, rmail

[Richard Stallman]

    > i dont want to do this.  qp.el is maintained primarily in another
    > repository,

    I don't know why that's a problem.  I'd have thought it was an
    advantage for someone else to be doing maintenance.

I'm talking about where the master copy is, and how that relates
to the file in the Emacs repository--not which people do what work.

If a file is mainly maintained outside of the Emacs repository that
means the version in the Emacs repository often isn't really the
latest copy.  It means that when we make a change in the Emacs
repository, it might be accidentally lost.  It is better to avoid
the situation where a file maintained in this way is used from
other parts of Emacs.

I will get rid of the rmail version of the code to unquote printables
and make it use the one in mailutils.

    > if all that were moved out of th gnus subdir, then we could consider
    > this.

    Why does it matter which directory they live in?

If we move it out of the gnus subdir, then I expect it will be maintained
as an ordinary part of Emacs rather than as part of Gnus.  That would
eliminate the problem described above.

    [Does this mean that I must give up attempts to sync Emacs code with
    gnulib, which is maintained separately?]

That situation is different.  For those files,
we want Emacs to contain a copy of what is in gnulib.
We want to avoid making ANY changes in these files in Emacs,
since they would cause the versions to fork.