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To: xemacs-beta@xemacs.org
Subject: Some gratuitous rantings about tm
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From: Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof@math.ethz.ch>
Date: 13 Mar 1997 10:02:34 +0100
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This may be not the right place for it but
  * tm is included with the XEamcs beta's
  * The annoyances occur mainly when reading this list
       because here MIME is actually used a lot to include files.
  * It may be the way tm is installed in the beta releases.
  * I am not subscribed to any tm lists (bad excuse I know).

Let me first start by saying that I like having a single mime package
packaged with XEmacs, it's good thing. But to me it seems that despite
version numbers that are only rivaled by temacs itself itm is still
not as mature as most of the other major packages.

1. The documentation seems to be extreemly poor (may be the Japanese
   version is better). The info file is not really extensive and most
   of all, most symbols have no doc strings which I think is a sin.
   This hurt me when looking for a solution for 2.
2. Now here in the latin1 part of the world, with xemacs-betas as a
   good example, MIME is mostly used for two things. One of of them
   is inline images which work fine under tm. The other thing is
   attaching files. Here tm seems to be severely lacking (please,
   please I would be delighted to be proven wrong on this).
   Now I would expect that an Emacs mime package would allow me at
   least the following
       A. Extract to disc, prompting for a directory and filename
          (with the default from the mime tag)
       B. Open in an Emacs buffer with apropriate name.
       C. Insert in the mime-view regardless of whether it is
          application/ms-accel or not.
   In particular I think tm has a lot to learn from gnus-uu

My misgivings are mostly about the treatment of
application/octet-stream attachments that are used here in xemacs-beta
a lot to include pacthes and backtraces. Let me take as an example
what happened yesterday. Somebody posted a (gdb where) backtrace of a
crash as application/octet-stream, base64 encoded. Now I know for sure
my XEmacs can display it but tm refused to do [C]. [B] seems to be
unavaible. The only thing posible seems to to to [A] with the extract
option. However this extracts the contents in /tmp/[randomfilename]!!!
A major annoyance (especially since this this /tmp on the machine
where XEmacs runs, not where I am actually working on).

* Why is it using an external program for this? (Note that there seems
  to a better tm-file methode implemenation in tm-file.el).
  Note that it also uses the external program for 7bit encoding where
  extracting would simply be a save-region!.
* Even more annoying: As I after grepping the source found our that
  there is a tm-view/temp-file variable. WHY DOESN'T IT PASS THIS TO the
  tm-file script?!!!!!!!!!!!
* Why doesn't it prompt for filename and directory? Note the
  tm-file.el version seems to do!

All in all I would prefer people using uuencode and shar in this list
becuase all this functionality is in gnus-uu :-(

please prove me wrong, I cannot be the only one that wants to
extract files.

Jan

          

