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From: kgk@CS.BROWN.EDU
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.bug
Subject: mail-mode
Message-ID: <8809301406.AA00325@bimini.cs.brown.edu>
Date: 30 Sep 88 14:06:12 GMT
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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