Re: Sending attachments

[Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> I don't think anybody was talking about ``real support for MIME''.
> People who managed to get away without MIME at all till this day
> probably don't need more than a simple way of attaching non-text
> files.

It's not what rms asked about, but it's certainly relevant to the
discussion.  Even if rms and ams would be satisfied with mail-mode +
simple-attach, it's natural to step back and think about the wider
implications of doing that.

In particular, the objections to simply adopting message-mode are still
unclear to me (other than the obvious one, that rms continues to be
annoyed because it was merged [apparently] without asking him).  Roughly
these objections seem to be something along the lines of "mail-mode is
simpler", but unless I've missed it, there's been little discussion of
exactly what the benefits of that are.

Some random points that come to mind:

  (1) We must still maintain message-mode as well, so mail-mode's
      "simplicity" yields no obvious code maintenance Benefit.

      Indeed, it's obviously more of a _burden_ to maintain both modes
      than it is to maintain message-mode alone (in the case that we got
      rid of mail-mode).  This burden goes up, of course, if mail-mode
      starts getting more features, like the suggested attachments.

  (2) I've used both modes over the years, and from my viewpoint as a
      user, both modes seem pretty much the same form a UI standpoint --
      message-mode has more bindings to support its additional
      functionality, but they do not get in the way as far as I can see.

      So as far as I can tell, mail-mode does not have an obviously
      simpler UI for the average user.

So... what exactly _is_ the "simplicity advantage" that's been alluded to?

[The "duplicated code disadvantage", on the other hand is pretty obvious...]

Thanks,

-Miles

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