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: gpg-ring.el gpg.el hashcash.el one-line-cookie.diff ssl.el 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.