Hi!

I’ve written a patch for Gnus that handles MIME character set selection more
intelligently under XEmacs. With this change, and with Stephen Turnbull’s
latin-unity available—as is usual under XEmacs with Mule—you can set
mm-coding-system-priorities to an ordered list, and Gnus will choose the
first coding system that can encode the message, as the MIME character set
to send. This is the case even with multiple character sets in a message, a
case that’s badly handled at the moment.

Katsumi Yamaoka; In b9yeki8faw8.fsf@jpl.org on gnu.emacs.gnus, you say that
mm-coding-system-priorities should be honoured by the latest Gnus even in
XEmacs. I’m unclear as to how this is possible, given that
mm-use-find-coding-systems-region must always be nil under XEmacs
(find-coding-systems-region doesn’t exist in it) and the only place the
variable is referenced is after checking if it’s “t”. Cf. line 594 of
mm-util.el. 

Reiner Steib, in message v9oehcoozg.fsf%40marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de ,
suggests that I separate out the bulk of my changes into a separate
function, which I’ve done in the attached patch. I’ve tested the patch on 
GNU Emacs 21.3.1 with the CVS trunk version of Gnus, and no change was
observed, as expected. I’ve also tested the patch with the CVS trunk version
of Gnus, and XEmacs 21.4.13, but CVS Gnus is unable to connect to a NNTP
server for me with that combination. 21.5.18 crashes for me when I try to do
the same thing. 

With the stable Gnus that Debian installed with 21.4, 5.10.2, the patch
works fine for me. Ditto for the version a recent XEmacs sumo tarball had,
5.10.6.

As well as the patch, I’ve attached a file that tests what it does. Since it
only does anything on XEmacs, you’ll need a copy of XEmacs to run it. Both
files are available uncompressed over the web at
http://parhasard.net/mm-xemacs-coding-systems.diff and
http://parhasard.net/mm-xemacs-coding-test.el , respectively.  

Reiner also tells me that I need to send a copyright assignment to the FSF
to get this added to mainline Gnus; where do I get the forms for this? Can I
download PDFs and print them out?

Best regards,  

	- Aidan
-- 
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and
more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day
the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the
White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – H.L. Mencken