comments on pgnus-v0.80

[SL Baur <steve@xemacs.org>]

Some miscellaneous comments after trying out the latest edition of
Pterodactyl Gnus.

* Group entry appears to be substantially faster than with Gnus 5.6+tm.

* Escape Quoted is not a wise default for a coding system and can lead
  to lossage[1].  It is probably better to let the editor decide which
  coding system to use.

* The MIME display defaults are unintuitive.  Could you please make
  them more Netscapish?  In particular, every MIME type that can be
  displayed inline, should be displayed inline by default, at least in 
  XEmacs.  It's what most users have come to expect.

* Notwithstanding the previous item and the coolness of Lars'
  presentation, I'm not sure I like handing html parts to W3 as a
  default.  It was pretty cool that tm blanked it out -- html
  doesn't belong in either mail or news.  How fast does this all
  work on slow(er) machines?  W3 flies on Demeter, but that's not
  exactly a fair test yet.

* Displaying html, even with a properly specified charset of
  ISO-2022-JP, loses contained Japanese text.  See
        http://www.xemacs.org/~slb/305
  for a message that exhibits this lossage.
  I put a screen snippet of what I see at:
        http://www.xemacs.org/~slb/mojibake.jpg

* There doesn't appear to be any obvious way to send message/rfc822
  subparts.  The inability of tm to rationally deal with this MIME
  type is its biggest failing IMO.

* There needs to be a more descriptive error message about the
  incompatible change to the `nnmail-spool-file' variable.  A
  pointer to the manual (which contains good detail on this) would
  be fine, but I got a `wrong-type argument listp, procmail' beep
  the first time through.
  
* The broken `Attach file as MIME' function in the Message menu should 
  have a default keybinding.  How about C-c C-x TAB?

* It would be nice to have a preview function as in tm to see what a
  message looks like before sending it out.  If one already exists, it 
  should be added to the Message menu.

Footnotes: 
[1]  In particular, with XEmacs/Mule running under a Japanese locale,
included Japanese text isn't handled properly.  I've submitted a bug
report for this.