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Subject: Re: Some gratuitous rantings about tm
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From: Jan Vroonhof <vroonhof@math.ethz.ch>
Date: 17 Mar 1997 19:49:23 +0100
In-Reply-To: Steven L Baur's message of 17 Mar 1997 00:42:14 -0800
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Steven L Baur <steve@miranova.com> writes:

[Meta note: I may appear very negative here and in the previous
message, really I'm not. I do like most of tm and am very gratefull for all
the work that has been put into it. I just was very disappointed that
things I thought worked didn't]

> We don't have a single MIME package, we have three.

Yes, and I think it is bad thing. It devides up the efforts
unnecessarily. 

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

I know. I have been using the image including and Charset part of tm together
also very long now. It's just that I think that unfortunately the file
extract stuff it is not as good.

> 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.

I fully agree. I think MIME is usefull. I didn't do the require
'mime-setup for nothing. I was not flaming MIME or tm I was just
commenting that tm's current behaviour when treating atached files
(application/octet-stream) is not up to what I think is the standard
as even the rest of tm.


> >    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.

There is such a functionality in tm-file.el. It just isn't used, why?
tm somehow has a preferecnce for external programs.

> >        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.

Huh? I can visit any binary file now without problems. So I get a lot
of \043 etc, my fault.

> ?  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.

The problem is these standards are not well used, nor complete. I
think a merge of tm and gnus-uu to deal with application/octet-stream.

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

Huh? I am pretty sure I described my problem I was having with the
extreme limitations of tm-file. (Not respecting
mime-view/temp-directory, no promting for a sane location and file
name, unncessary use of an externel program)

> 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.

I am sure MIME is convenient for attaching files, because it can be
done properly. I just that tm's implementation (dumping everithing in
/tmp without asking the user) is NOT convenient.

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

Mime is good, tm just doens't always live up to it yet unfortunately.

> TM is brilliant at what it does, especially with dealing with language
> encodings.  It *nearly always* Does The Right Thing[1].

Like I said I never notice anything about the language encodings,
which means TM is doing its work brilantly. It's just that it isn't as
brilliant yet in the attached file department IMHO.

> 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.

I have seen VM's mime code at work now because a colleage uses VM. If
Kyle had just added this nice code to tm we wouldn't have the problem
I am ranting about. Why is there a vm-mime.el anyway?

[Religious mode off]

Ciaou,

Jan

