kgk@CS.BROWN.EDU (09/30/88)
In GNU Emacs 18.52.1 of Mon Sep 5 1988 on barney (berkeley-unix) I've had complaints that my previous posting regarding mail-mode autoloading was not sufficiently clear and that it was misguided. What I mean is the following: The function ``mail-mode'' is not autoloading by default. My assumption is that many people who use GNU Emacs use ``mail'', although this has been pointed out to be a possibly overeager assumption. At any rate, a user who wants to, say, visit an old #%*mail*% buffer from a crash, and call ``mail-mode'' on the buffer will find that this won't work, unless ``sendmail'' is already loaded in. What I mean by "there's no ``mail-mode.el''" is that a somewhat educated user, who knows enough to load libraries, but not really what libraries exist or where they are, may want to "load-library mail-mode" but find that there is no such thing. He/she has to look and realize that mail-mode is really in sendmail.el (provided the user knows where to look). This is not a hypothetical situation; it's happened to me more than once, that I want to call mail-mode explicitly on a buffer, but find emacs telling me that mail-mode isn't defined. This really catches me by surprise since I think it ought to be at least autoloading by default. I know that you can't incorporate every random suggestion for an addition to GNU Emacs, but I think this is relatively reasonable, although perhaps not absolutely necessary. Keiji Kanazawa
shap@polya.Stanford.EDU (Jonathan S. Shapiro) (10/01/88)
[Pacman's revenge...] One good reason not to include mail-mode as autoloaded is because mail mode is currently broken. Badly. Has anyone got a version of mail-mode that correctly handles parsing of headers on mail that came from UUCP-land? That reverses these addresses correctly? Jon