Re: RMAIL, MIME-related bug

[Thien-Thi Nguyen]

   From: "Alexander Pohoyda" <address@hidden>
   Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 15:27:40 +0200 (MEST)

   Sorry, but I do not understand what you propose here.
   Not to change anything because it may brake some code?

no, that is an extreme position that is recognizably unworkable.
i am, instead, proposing you analyze the code from a two-level
perspective, the design level (high) and the implementation
level (low), and change the implementation while keeping the
design.

here, the design is relatively (in my mind as an RMAIL user)
straightforward: allow customization of which headers are
visible and their ordering.  to date, the implementation has
been a re-rendering (copying) of the desired-visible headers to
another block followed by narrowing to that block.  what new
implementation you choose should support the design as well as
any additional criteria that have arisen since the original
rmail.el was written (e.g., encoding issues).

   Too much code may be based on current implementation.

this is something we cannot know a priori.  but if we know the
nature of the changes to the implementation layer, we can help
fix those pieces of code that rely on it.

we can do this by either retargeting the broken code to the new
implementation or by retargeting the broken code to the design.
the latter is preferable since, if we do a good job, the design
will not change so much in the future whereas the implementation
may (or may not ;-).

thi