Re: socks.el to be included?

[Michael Albinus <michael.albinus@gmx.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     The most recent version I've found is located on savannah, under the w3
>     project. Copyrights seem to be OK (assigned to FSF, authors are Bill
>     Perry and Dave Love).
>
> If it says in the file that those are the authors, that is not
> necessarily the case.  Often the main authors don't update such lists
> when they accept contributions from others.
>
> So we need to make sure that they really ARE the only authors, or find
> out who else did contribute and DTRT.

In the w3 CVS repository, there are only 9 revisions of socks.el, all
submitted by either Bill or Dave. The oldest revision is from 1998.

ChangeLogs claim "Wed Sep 4 02:09:08 1996" as initial version of
socks.el. Only one ChangeLog entry with a different submitter:

1999-11-09  Andrew Mazillius  <andrew_mazillius@pee.pioneer.be>

I've checked it in CVS; the corresponding patch is tiny (6 lines). But
it might be worth to check whether Andrew has signed the papers
already. If not, does he need to be contacted?

We could also ask Bill and Dave for other details, but I doubt they
will remember more than what was written in the ChangeLogs. The last
change of socks.el was 2002-01-22 (according to both ChangeLog and CVS
history).

>     url-gw.el does autoload socks.el. Tramp 2.1 does it also for gateway
>     methods.
>
> Lisp code in Emacs should not try to use Lisp files which are not part
> of Emacs.  So each of those uses of socks constitutes bugs.  Those
> calls to socks should not have been installed while socks was not part
> of Emacs.  It seems inevitable that Emacs 22.1 will contain these bugs,
> and that bothers me.
>
> If we can fix the bugs by installing socks, that's fine.  But we need
> to make sure that is legally ok (see above).  If we can't fix the bugs
> that way, we have to fix them by changing url-gw.el and Tramp not to
> use socks.

For Tramp there is no problem. I said "Tramp 2.1", which is not part
of Emacs yet. In fact my request is just preparing to migrate to Tramp
2.1 in the trunk.

For url-gw.el: I agree, it seems to be a bug. OTOH nobody did claim
for it until now, so it is not a serious one I guess.

Best regards, Michael.