Re: Sending attachments

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Richard Stallman writes:

 > There are two reasons.  First, its primary source is maintained
 > outside of Emacs.

I don't see how that's a reason not to use the perfectly good Message
mode that is a part of Emacs.  If you can't persuade them to go along
with your refactorings, you still will be starting from a much more
featureful MUA, one which is well-debugged and highly conformant.

 > 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.

That's certainly not my experience.  I'd say about half of the hackers
closest to me over the last 10 years have been at least occasional
contributors to Gnus.  And they've been really good citizens in
general even though their main interests are rather different from
"core" Emacs developers.

It seems to me that both Gnus and Emacs would benefit from you
pow-wowing with Miles Bader and anybody else who works on Gnus-Emacs
integration, and make the points about refactoring and maintainability
to them.  Ask them to represent your needs (ie, only the basic
features, more emphasis on refactoring and maintainability in Message
mode).  It's worth trying to avoid the duplication, for Message mode,
at least.