On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 04:33:23PM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2009-01-28 21:29:32 +0000, Antonio Radici wrote:
> > Hi Adrian,
> > the package maintainer has already expressed his opinion
> > setting the wontfix tag, so this won't be fixed on this
> > side of the pond.
>
> And in particular, not all users agree on the default value.
> So, it's better to keep it as it is currently.
>
> FYI, I prefer the current one because iso-8859-1 takes less space
> than utf-8 (note that on the network, mail is not compressed),
It only makes a difference if you use non-ASCII characters AND
no characters outside iso-8859-1 (like the € sign) in an email.
And the size advantage in these cases would typically be something
around 1%, so not really noticable.
> and
> because MUA's must be able to deal with both charsets anyway (and
> various encodings: QP, base64).
>
> Also, using "us-ascii:utf-8" will not affect received mail, so that
> if a user wants to deal with UTF-8 only, he must have some tools for
> charset conversion when receiving mail (and changing $send_charset
> would just be some minor configuration change for a specific usage).
As already discussed, having more charsets in the mix can cause problems
when sending patches in the body of an email (e.g. when submitting
patches to linux-kernel).
And one single character in the email making the charset flip from
iso-8859-1 to utf-8 makes such problems semi-random.
Noone can control the sending charset of all MUAs on this planet, but
one MUA less that defaults to sending with an UTF-8 incompatible charset
makes the situation a little bit better.
cu
Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
"Only a promise," Lao Er said.
Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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