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Subject: Re: Some gratuitous rantings about tm
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From: Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com>
In-Reply-To: Jan Vroonhof's message of 13 Mar 1997 10:02:34 +0100
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Date: 17 Mar 1997 00:42:14 -0800
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Jan Vroonhof writes:

> 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.

We don't have a single MIME package, we have three.  Some weird
unusable crap written by Marc Andreesen, and some very good stuff
written by MORIOKA Tomohiko and Kyle Jones.  We'll have a fourth
when Mew is distributable.

> 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.

Some of us have been using it happily for over a year and a half now.

> 1. The documentation seems to be extreemly poor (may be the Japanese
>    version is better).

Perhaps, I can't say.  I can't read much Japanese.  Lack of
documentation is not something I hold against a package usable without 
it (which tm is, IMHO).

>    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.

This is a failing which should be corrected.  Would anyone care to
write up a patch?

> 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).

Even if you are in a Latin-1 part of the world you still have to
consider solutions which work everywhere, else you end up with
alt.chinese.text.  MIME allows the sender to specify what encoding the 
text of the message is in.  This is not guessable in general because
encodings overlap.  It is A Good Thing to require everyone to tag
their encodings just on general principle and not play favorites with
the current most popular encoding.

>    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)

Agreed.  I might even have requested something like this before.

>        B. Open in an Emacs buffer with apropriate name.

That's a good idea.

>        C. Insert in the mime-view regardless of whether it is
>           application/ms-accel or not.

Difficult to do in general.  On a tty blasting something that may be
interpreted as tty control characters is rude.

>    In particular I think tm has a lot to learn from gnus-uu

?  Gnus-uu is a brilliant (originally written by) jwz hack in the
absence of any standards. We have standards now, we don't need the
hack any more.


 [Example (which used VM not TM for whatever it's worth, not that it
   would have changed anything) elided]

We need a FAQ for this.  I see Kyle has been educating people on the
VM newsgroup about it, and it has passed FAQ status on the tm mailing
list.

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

And I do not.  Even as convenient as Gnus makes uuencode and shar to
deal with, they are not as convenient as properly encoded MIME.  User
education and example is the key here.

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

As do I.  I can deal with properly MIME encoded files in seconds.
Uuencoded and shar are always a relatively pain in the hinder to deal
with.

MIME is good.  You will be assimilated. :-)

TM is brilliant at what it does, especially with dealing with language
encodings.  It *nearly always* Does The Right Thing[1].  From the messages
I've gotten from Kyle, VM also has the ability to deal with sending MIME
attachments properly.  This is a matter of education and the sooner we
all become familiar with the technology and adept at it, the better.
The code is there folks.

[1]
The exception being inserting section tags into text which is a patch,
that might be fixed now.
-- 
steve@miranova.com baur
Unsolicited commercial e-mail will be billed at $250/message.

