On Mon, Dec 11, 2006 at 11:00:31AM +0100, Jan Willem Stumpel wrote: > This subject sometimes comes up, but not nearly frequently enough > I think. > > The web archives of this list at > http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/ do not preserve utf-8 > characters intact. This is absurd given the subject of this list.
Oh yes... (sigh) Short summary of one particular thread trying to get this bug fixed: Dec 2004: bug caught by me in Mhonarc 2.6.10, reported to author, and fixed by the author in CVS nearly immediately. Mar 2005: I asked the maintainers of nl.linux.org to apply this fix. No reply for two weeks. Mar 2005, two weeks later: sent this mail: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/2005-03/msg00032.html to this list. No worthful answer arrived to the list, but at least Bruno Haible (co-founder of the list with Markus) forwarded this mail (cc'ing me) to Rik van Riel (site admin) with a preface asking if he could fix this. Rik replied: "I will fix this once there's a new version of mhonarc that has the bugfix. Playing around with a CVS version might not be the best idea on such a large mail archive..." Apr 2005: Bruno wrote me: "Markus and I are the initiators of the linux-utf8 list. I'm glad that Rik does the hosting and admin service for us, for five years. I don't think that moving to a new list address (a small trouble for everyone) is worth the trouble. Also, you know, anyone can create a list archive on his own. For example, gmane.org carries archives of linux-utf8, but many messages seem to be missing. The easiest way to fix the problem is therefore to create an alternative archive of the list somewhere else." May 2005: mhonarc 2.6.11 is released, including the fix. I sent this mail to Rik and Bruno: "Back to this topic we discussed two months ago: There's a new official mhonarc release available which fixes the UTF-8 bugs. Please upgrade to it and re-generate the mail archives so that the accented letters show up correctly on the web archive." No reply since then. To summarize: I have a feeling that those people who could do anything for this bug to get fixed do not care at all. :-( It's a two-byte fix that should be applied to mhonarc, or it should be upgraded to a newer version that fixes lots of other bugs, and the archives need to be re-generated, which probably takes 2 minutes from the sysadmin's time (to find out the proper command). Definitely much less time that I spent so far catching this bug in mhonarc and typing all these e-mails... Jan, I perfectly agree with you: "This is absurd." -- Egmont -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
