Re: Shimbun Basics

["clemens fischer" <ino-qc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

* Romain FRANCOISE:

> What about people who don't use Gnus?

what i read in the docs indicated that shimbun makes certain feeds
available like gnus groups.  i thought gnus was neccessary to use it?

> I don't think it qualifies as big given the size of other projects:
> Emacs itself, Gnus, Eshell, cc-mode are good examples of what
> defines "big".  Keep in mind that most of the stuff that comes with
> the emacs-w3m distribution is often optional and not mandatory to
> use the simple browsing interface.

emacs is big beyond the point where a more modern lisp can easily be
substituted for the old elisp.  emacs is too big.  the bugs in gnus
seem to come from uncontrolled side-effects in the code base, which
nobody grasps completely.  many fixes in the current gnus code are
actually work arounds.  so gnus is too big as well.  the eshell
doesn't work.  trust me, i've tried real hard to get it up, but it
contains bugs that will even freeze up emacs.  unusable.  it's author
can't or doesn't want to fix it, and RMS proposed a litle workaround
to alow me to C-g out when it freezes.

so what are you trying to tell me?  that we should watch emacs-w3m
become so big that it is as unmanagable as the other giants?

why not decompose it and make use of the modules where they can be
used efficiently?  why make a supersonic hyperthing covering every
base just so that some percent of its users can read japanese
newspapers, and continue with parallel development of stuff that has
been invented before?

> About that I have one remark though: emacs-w3m in Debian now depends
> on APEL because of the call to make-temp-file in octet.el, would
> there be a way to replace that call by a home-made function?  I
> don't want to install APEL on my systems just for octet.el, which I
> don't even use...

sure.  APEL became neccessary for shimbun.  maybe in a few months you
will have to install all sorts of stuff just to be able to _not_ use
"optional stuff".

  clemens