> On Oct 17, 2016, at 6:39 PM, Ken Hornstein <[email protected]> wrote: > > What it refuses to do now is create improperly-formatted email messages > when it cannot identify the character set. Before it would happily > send these messages out; THAT has been broken for twenty years and was > only recently fixed. > > And if we're voting ... I would rather have only one additional way to > specify a nmh-specific locale (well, I'd rather have ZERO additional > ways, but I think more than one way is overkill). > > (And it occurs to me that even setting the locale properly probably > will not fix your specific problem, as you have described it; forwarding > messages using MIME will).
The underlying problem is that locales were built before anyone really understood the problem. For one, they assume symmetry on input and output; there is no LC_CTYPE_INPUT and LC_CTYPE_OUTPUT. This is why Plan9 punted on the entire issue and said UTF-8 everywhere. Do what you want outside, but it's your job to convert to UTF-8 before you talk to or from the tools. And they provided a command line tool to do just that. If you look at the Plan9 mail system, it's all UTF-8 internally. When mail comes in over the wire, the appropriate MIME charset= parameters are used to convert content to UTF-8 for display (upas/fs takes care of this). By definition, all input is UTF-8. If we were to use $LANG/$LC_CTYPE to convert incoming data to UTF-8 in the same manner, and process (and store!) everything internally as UTF-8, all of this nonsense would go away. Similarly, we could convert from UTF-8 -> $LANG/$LC_CTYPE on the way out. And we could ship everything off-site with one of only two character sets: ascii, or utf8. Good grief, even Microsoft has figured this out :-P Yes, someone has to write the code. Let's ship 1.7 (if Ralph ever stops committing!), then do 1.8 (the SSL/TLS stuff). And then let's branch for 2.0 and go for a top-to-bottom UTF-8 runtime. I've been pharting around with this for a couple of years now in my own private branch. It's not trivial, but it's doable. And maybe *mh should lead the way again, for the first time in a few decades. --lyndon _______________________________________________ Nmh-workers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/nmh-workers
