Re: sha1.el and hex-util.el

[Reiner Steib]

On Sat, Aug 25 2007, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> Why are these two packages in the gnus/ subdirectory?  

Well, they were added in the Gnus repository and (most probably) only
used in Gnus upto now.  I don't have a strong opinion on that.

> I don't see anything specific to Gnus in them.

FYI, in the current development version of Gnus, we have a file
texi/gnus-coding.texi which included statements on Gnus (non-)
dependencies.

--8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
@node Gnus Coding Style
@chapter Gnus Coding Style
@section Dependencies

The Gnus distribution contains a lot of libraries that have been written
for Gnus and used intensively for Gnus.  But many of those libraries are
useful on their own.  E.g. other Emacs Lisp packages might use the
@acronym{MIME} library @xref{Top, ,Top, emacs-mime, The Emacs MIME
Manual}.

@subsection General purpose libraries

@table @file

@item netrc.el
@file{.netrc} parsing functionality.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item format-spec.el
Functions for formatting arbitrary formatting strings.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item hex-util.el
Functions to encode/decode hexadecimal string.
@c As of 2007-08-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.
@end table

@subsection Encryption and security

@table @file
@item encrypt.el
File encryption routines
@c As of 2005-10-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item password.el
Read passwords from user, possibly using a password cache.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item tls.el
TLS/SSL support via wrapper around GnuTLS
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item pgg*.el
Glue for the various PGP implementations.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.

@item sha1.el
SHA1 Secure Hash Algorithm.
@c As of 2007-08-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.
@end table

@subsection Networking

@table @file
@item dig.el
Domain Name System dig interface.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no serious Gnus dependencies in this file.  Uses
@code{gnus-run-mode-hooks} (a wrapper function).

@item dns.el, dns-mode.el
Domain Name Service lookups.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.
@end table

@subsection Mail and News related RFCs

@table @file
@item pop3.el
Post Office Protocol (RFC 1460) interface.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item imap.el
@acronym{IMAP} library.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item ietf-drums.el
Functions for parsing RFC822bis headers.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item rfc1843.el
HZ (rfc1843) decoding.  HZ is a data format for exchanging files of
arbitrarily mixed Chinese and @acronym{ASCII} characters.
@c As of 2005-10-21...
@code{rfc1843-gnus-setup} seem to be useful only for Gnus.  Maybe this
function should be relocated to remove dependencies on Gnus.  Other
minor dependencies: @code{gnus-newsgroup-name} could be eliminated by
using an optional argument to @code{rfc1843-decode-article-body}.

@item rfc2045.el
Functions for decoding rfc2045 headers
@c As of 2007-08-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.

@item rfc2047.el
Functions for encoding and decoding rfc2047 messages
@c As of 2007-08-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.
@c
Only a couple of tests for gnusy symbols.

@item rfc2104.el
RFC2104 Hashed Message Authentication Codes
@c As of 2007-08-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.

@item rfc2231.el
Functions for decoding rfc2231 headers
@c As of 2007-08-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.

@item flow-fill.el
Interpret RFC2646 "flowed" text.
@c As of 2005-10-27...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.

@item uudecode.el
Elisp native uudecode.
@c As of 2005-12-06...
There are no Gnus dependencies in this file.
@c ... but the custom group is gnus-extract.

@item canlock.el
Functions for Cancel-Lock feature
@c Cf. draft-ietf-usefor-cancel-lock-01.txt
@c Although this draft has expired, Canlock-Lock revived in 2007 when
@c major news providers (e.g. news.individual.org) started to use it.
@c As of 2007-08-25...
There are no Gnus dependencies in these files.

@end table

@subsection message

All message composition from Gnus (both mail and news) takes place in
Message mode buffers.  Message mode is intended to be a replacement for
Emacs mail mode.  There should be no Gnus dependencies in
@file{message.el}.

@subsection Emacs @acronym{MIME}

The files @file{mml*.el} and @file{mm-*.el} provide @acronym{MIME}
functionality for Emacs.

@acronym{MML} (@acronym{MIME} Meta Language) is supposed to be
independent from Gnus.  Alas it is not anymore.  Patches and suggestions
to remove the dependencies are welcome.

@subsection Gnus backends

The files @file{nn*.el} provide functionality for accessing NNTP
(@file{nntp.el}), IMAP (@file{nnimap.el}) and several other Mail back
ends (probably @file{nnml.el}, @file{nnfolder.el} and
@file{nnmaildir.el} are the most widely used mail back ends).

@c mm-uu requires nnheader which requires gnus-util.  message.el also
@c requires nnheader.

--8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---

See
<http://quimby.gnus.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~gnus/texi/gnus-coding.texi?rev=HEAD&content-type=text/plain>
for the complete file.

The "As of 200n-nn-nn" comments say when it was checked the last time.
But I think also the 2005 statements should be still correct as we
tried not to introduce further dependencies.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
       ,,,
      (o o)
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