GNU bug report logs - #35507
Gnus mojibakifies UTF-8 text/x-patch attachments from Thunderbird

Previous Next

Full log

View this message in rfc822 format

From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz <at> gnu.org>
To: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
Cc: 35507 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#35507: Gnus mojibakifies UTF-8 text/x-patch attachments from Thunderbird
Date: Wed, 01 May 2019 22:05:59 +0300

> Cc: 35507 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
> From: Paul Eggert <eggert <at> cs.ucla.edu>
> Date: Wed, 1 May 2019 11:26:35 -0700
> 
> > I don't see why we should
> > change Gnus in this regard, certainly not unconditionally assuming
> > UTF-8.
> Gnus is mishandling emails sent from Thunderbird right now, so it would
> be a practical benefit for Gnus users if it did a better job of decoding
> these admittedly-iffy messages.
> 
> These days, UTF-8 is by far the most common encoding specified for
> non-ASCII text in email and its popularity is growing, so it's the best
> choice for a default if Gnus will have one - certainly better than the
> confusing behavior that Robert Pluim observed in his Gnus session.
> Gnus's current behavior may have been a good idea in 1996 when RFC 2046
> said US-ASCII was the default, but it stopped being a good idea in 2012
> when RFC 6657 came out and said that UTF-8 should be the default if
> there is a default.
> 
> Another possibility is that Gnus could ask the user which encoding to
> use when the email headers don't specify one and when the text is not
> ASCII; even that would be better than Gnus's current behavior of forcing
> US-ASCII and displaying something like "\xe2\x80\x99" when it encounters
> a non-ASCII character.

I'm okay with having a default that's customizable.  I also think Gnus
should have a feature that allows the user to request "re-decoding" of
a message part, because no matter how smart are we and our defaults,
they will sometimes fail.

Previous Next

GNU bug tracking system
Copyright (C) 1999 Darren O. Benham, 1997,2003 nCipher Corporation Ltd, 1994-97 Ian Jackson.