Hallvard B Furuseth <h.b.furuseth@usit.uio.no> writes:

> > So Gnus uses quite a bit of energy to avoid the implicit transformation
> > so that the explicit transformation can be done safely.

> You mean you _haven't_ bitched that MULE makes it hard to work with
> files that have explicit character set information??

I do not speak Mule, and many people warned me that it is not easy to do
it proficiently.  On one hand, it discourages me a bit; on the other hand,
it raises my admiration for those who do! :-)

For PO files (those files containing English texts and their translation
in another language), we decided for a MIME-like header to drive charsets.
I begged Handa-san to tell me how to interface PO files with Mule display,
and he kindly provided a few lines of Emacs LISP code which I blindly
added to `po-mode.el', making the happiness of many translators using Emacs.

My point is that Handa's modification was a little thing, and so, it would
be grossly exaggerated to call it "hard".  Yet, it would have been hard
for me to discover it all alone.  I guess that Mule would appear easier if
people, like me, knew better where to find some full documentation for it.
I saved many `.texi' fragments I found here and there, most of these are
old and of uneasy reading.  My impression is that the FSF did not really
reuse nor rejuvenate the documentation made by the original Japanese team.[1]

We often underestimate the importance of having complete, legible,
properly updated documentation in the success of a package, or the speed
of acceptance.  For packages being changed, reimplemented, challenged,
and rethought all along like Mule seems to be, the documentation job might
become especially difficult.

--------------------
[1] FSF and documentation...  I had to live some, euh, hum, /difficulties/
about the `tar'/`paxutils' manual, in the form of strong interference.  If I
did not break free, `tar' would probably not have a manual yet.  (Of course,
the FSF might hold me responsible that we do not have a *better* manual.)
It is not hard for me to imagine that the Japanese team had similar problems,
yet the plain truth is that I have no idea of the real story.  The FSF is
discrete, and those Japanese fellows are polite enough to stay silent! :-)

-- 
François Pinard                            mailto:pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
Join the free Translation Project!    http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard