[Mailman-Developers] Missing footers with latest CVS

[Ben Gertzfield]

>>>>> "Dan" == Dan Mick <dmick@utopia.west.sun.com> writes:

    Ben> Basically, we need to deal with the case where a list is
    Ben> configured for something like iso-8859-2, but a user sends a
    Ben> message in iso-8859-1, or utf-8, etc.  In these cases, we
    Ben> can't just tack the footer on -- we'll get a garbage message!
    Ben> We have to avoid adding a footer if the charsets mismatch; no
    Ben> other way about it.

    Dan> Why a garbage message?  Why not just a (potentially) garbage
    Dan> footer?

Here's an example.

My Japanese terminal accepts EUC-JP and ISO-2022-JP only.  If I
displayed a Japanese ISO-2022-JP message with an illegal ISO-8859-1
footer on it, not only would it be a garbage footer, but any further
output to the terminal AFTER the footer would be complete garbage,
because the illegal 8-bit characters would "shift" my terminal into a
special Japanese-only mode.

Basically, illegal footers can be worse than just illegal -- they can
render the reader's terminal completely useless, requiring a total
restart.  This is not acceptable.
 
    Dan> I'd be more concerned about what happened to the message,
    Dan> since it's apparently sent in a language that can't be
    Dan> understood by its audience.

Why?  You can set a list's default charset to Japanese, but often get
messages in English, Chinese, or Korean.  Adding a Japanese footer to
these unconditionally without making the whole thing a MIME message
with separate parts with their own charsets would break everyone's
terminals.

    Dan> There's something about the fullness of charset processing
    Dan> that I don't grok.  I think it has to do with design.  Are
    Dan> there design notes somewhere?

I'm not exactly sure what you mean about fullness, but here's a
little explanation from (gasp) Microsoft that covers 7-bit ASCII,
8-bit IBM PC-DOS characters, double-byte character sets like
Japanese and Chinese, and Unicode:

http://www.microsoft.com/typography/unicode/cs.htm

Ben

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