Re: [rmail-mbox-branch]: mail-utils

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

On Sat, Oct 09, 2004 at 01:34:49AM +0200, Alexander Pohoyda wrote:
> > The mm- stuff seems not to be intended to be gnus-specific, but rather
> > general-purpose code for handling mime that happens to be developed as part
> > of gnus.
> 
> Yes, I understand the intention.
> 
> 
> > There are probably a few dependencies on gnus that have crept in, but I
> > presume these could be excised.
> 
> Some mm-*.el files use quite often functions or constants with gnus-
> prefix.

Can you be more specific?  I did a grep, and the dependencies seem pretty
much restricted to a few files (e.g., mm-view.el); the most general mime
functionality seems pretty clean at first glance.

Note that some places the mm- stuff has code of the form:

  (if (or (eq foo ...) (eq foo ...) (eq foo 'gnus-magic-constant))
     ...)

But this sort of thing is perfectly fine -- it's not really a dependency at
all, because all it does is tweak the behavior specially for gnus in some
way.

> I would like to have a clean MIME library first.

Sure, and the mm- stuff seems like the right to start from.  It would
completely silly to reimplement all of it when mm- is pretty close to what
you want anyway.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if so, please give details, don't just assert it.

Thanks,

-Miles
-- 
I'm beginning to think that life is just one long Yoko Ono album; no rhyme
or reason, just a lot of incoherent shrieks and then it's over.  --Ian Wolff