Synch to No Gnus 200603030746.

[elisp/gnus.git-] / contrib / README

diff --git a/contrib/README b/contrib/README
index 76d0e5c..7e8a31d 100644 (file)
--- a/contrib/README
+++ b/contrib/README
@@ -1,3 +1,85 @@
-The files in this directory are not (yet) part of the
-Gnus distribution proper.  They may later become part
-of the distribution, or they may disappear altogether.
+The files in this directory are not (yet) part of the Gnus
+distribution proper.  They may later become part of the distribution,
+or they may disappear altogether.
+
+Please note that it is not good to just add this directory to
+load-path: a number of files in this directory will become part of
+more recent Emacs versions, so that you might be running obsolete
+libraries with all kinds of ill effects.
+
+The suggested method for installation is to copy those files that you
+need to a directory which is in load-path.
+
+Here is an overview of the files:
+
+compface.el
+
+       Provides the ELisp-based uncompface program.  It is excellent
+       and practical (actually you can replace lisp/compface.el with
+       it), however the author is missing and the copyright has not
+       been assigned yet.
+
+gnus-namazu.el
+
+       This file defines the command to search mails and persistent
+       articles with Namazu, which is a full-text search engine
+       distributed at http://namazu.org, and to browse its results
+       with Gnus.
+
+       Please note, this file has already been incorporated into the
+       lisp directory in T-gnus.
+
+gpg-ring.el
+gpg.el
+
+hashcash.el
+
+nnir.el
+
+       Interface to various full-text search engines.  Provides less
+       functionality than gnus-namazu.el, but also supports programs
+       other than Namazu.  Current implementation is restricted to
+       nnml folders, but could be extended for other backends.
+
+one-line-cookie.diff
+
+sendmail.el
+smtpmail.el
+
+       Copies of the corresponding files from the Emacs lisp/mail/
+       directory, to provide features (occasionally) needed by Gnus which
+       may not be provided by the versions of these files in older Emacs
+       distributions.
+
+ssl.el
+
+        Obsolete interface to OpenSSL.  Completely replaced by
+        lisp/tls.el, which supports both GnuTLS and OpenSSL.  This
+        file will be removed eventually.
+
+ucs-tables.el
+
+       This file provides improved Unicode functionality.  It defines
+       functions unify-8859-on-encoding-mode and
+       unify-8859-on-decoding-mode which unify the Latin-N charsets.
+       Without unify-8859-on-encoding-mode, composing a Latin-9 reply
+       to a Latin-1 posting, say, will produce a multipart posting (a
+       Latin-1 part and a Latin-9 part), or perhaps UTF-8.  With
+       unify-8859-on-encoding-mode, the outgoing posting can be all
+       Latin-1 or all Latin-9 in most cases.
+
+       It is harmless to turn on unify-8859-on-encoding-mode, but
+       unify-8859-on-decoding-mode may unexpectedly change files in
+       certain situations.  (If the file contains different Latin-N
+       charsets which should not be unified.)
+
+       This is part of Emacs 21.3 and later, which also turns on
+       unify-8859-on-encoding-mode by default.
+
+vcard.el
+
+xml.el
+
+       This is used for parsing RSS feeds.  Part of Emacs 21.3 and later.
+       Note that the version of this file in the Gnus contrib/ directory is
+       out of date with respect to the version in the Emacs tree.