Re: Gnus and Emacs 20.3 and MIME

["François Pinard" <pinard@iro.umontreal.ca>]

Kai Grossjohann <grossjohann@amaunet.cs.uni-dortmund.de> writes:

> What do you guys use for this combination?  [...]  I just want a fairly
> workable solution that carries me over until Gnus groks MIME.

I peeked a bit around, and decided for `mime-compose.el' at message
composition time.  It only handles flat multipart (which I do not create
often anyway), and it looks like enough for now -- I only mean here that
I can live with that, not that I'm really satisfied.  For single part
messages like this one, a simple hook adds the necessary fields in the
header, so the various sendmails around here could do on-the-fly conversion
to quoted-printable for sites having older (or misconfigured :-) sendmails.

At message read time, I manage with a few simple Emacs functions I wrote,
which call a recent pretest of `recode' under the scene to do specific
decodings.  Sometimes, rarely, for more complex messages, I `o' the message
into a Babyl file and visit it, so to trigger `rmime.el'.  Once again,
I can live with that, even if not satisfied.

I used TM/SEMI for a while, not getting discouraged by installation
complexities, until they dropped Gnus support as a patch over Gnus.  TM/SEMI
is surely a very competent and featureful effort.  Despite I prefer being
collaborative, I did not like much that they distribute a parallel branch
of Gnus, and decided to stick more closely to the original Gnus development.

Moreover, if I dare to say, despite MIME undoubtly has its own complexities,
I think MIME should be nothing more than an aspect of Gnus, and all things
should be kept in proportion.  We should at least _aim_ that Gnus has a
MIME implementation which stays simple and non-obtrusive.  So, I'm ready to
stay a bit MIME-less until Gnus groks MIME, which hopefully will happen soon.

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