Today, Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@acm.org> wrote:
>  asf> I agree in that this problem is not a simple one; but I do think
>  asf> this is a debian issue (see my previous mail - when I suppress
>  asf> loading of the user config file (I never touch my system-wide
>  asf> config), gnus features are present).
> 
> 	Yes, the built in Gnus is not suppressed.  Perhaps we should
>  compare load paths? As you can see, 

I now know why this happens. And I could kick somebody for it. Most
probably, I will be the one who gets kicked (-:

The package w3-url-lisp's url.el has (require 'mailcap) in it. And guess
where mailcap.el(c) can be found? Right, in lisp/gnus/mailcap.el; This
one pulls in mm-util and all the others. I've just reported a bug on
this package, but I think this is a debian emacs bug, as well.

Oh well, so much for that problem (-:

Thanks for the help and patience from you all,
-- 
Andreas Fuchs, <asf@acm.org>, asf@jabber.at, antifuchs