vm team mailing list archive

[Uday S Reddy <u.s.reddy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Stephen,

Thanks for the detailed response.

If Rob was the only person doing patches to the XEmacs patches, then I
think we can pretty sure that the there won't be any serious
divergence.  But if other people contributed patches to the XEmacs
package, it is possible that those changes might be missing in the
upstream version.  I will check to see.

Rob, who is still on the vm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx list, is unfortunately
not reading his robf.de email.  We do not believe that he will come
back to doing any contributions in the near future.

I have been asking around to see if somebody else can maintain the
XEmacs package but so far I have had no takers.  Ulrich and I are not
active XEmacs-users.  So, we are probably not suitable for this work.
My impression is that our XEmacs-users have been very sheltered by
your package system and they aren't willing to go out of their way to
try out the latest versions.  (This is in contrast to several Gnu
Emacs-users who regularly download nightly builds and keep me on my
toes!)  So, it would be really good if somebody from the XEmacs team
can take this responsibility.  I can alert him/her whenever there is a
suitable new release of VM to be incorporated in XEmacs.

----

I am glad to hear that you have looked closely at vm-mime.el.  It is
almost 100% Kyle Jones's work.  So, from this sample, you have a
pretty good idea of how VM is put together internally.

I was never thrilled about the code quality of VM, but the valuable
assets of VM are its reliability and high-quality user documentation.
There is only one publicly known instance of somebody losing email or
having mail corrupted.  And that is an excellent record.

Our first priority in the current development is to catch up with all
the functionality that has been missed since Kyle Jones signed off,
IMAP being the first and maildir being next.  Future plans are for
integration with Org mode and other aspects of higher-level email and
task management.  Improving code quality is not a priority for us.

I think it is an excellent idea to build core libraries for email
processing in mua-lib which all the mail clients can use.  I will be
glad to chip in where I can.

We do have a plan to switch VM from sendmail to message-mode.  Do I
understand that you already have some combination of VM and
message-mode?  Would you like to share it with us?

Cheers,
Uday