[Mailman-Users] UTF8 descriptions

[Geoff Shang]

On Tue, 17 Aug 2010, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Geoff Shang wrote:
>>
>> The problem is that when she tried entering in Hebrew descriptions and welcome
>> messages, she got text like this:
>>
>> קבוצת
[snip]
>> NOte that the default list language was set to English, if that makes any
>> difference.  Would the default language need to be set to Hebrew to make these
>> fields input correctly when the form is submitted?
>
>
> Either that or set the character set for English to UTF-8 if you/she
> has that ability. It requires putting
>
> add_language('en', 'English (USA)', 'utf-8', 'ltr')
>
> in mm_cfg.py and restarting Mailman.

I can do this, as I am an admin on the system where this is hosted.

I see now that there are entries like this in Defaults.py.  So the entry 
in mm_cfg.py will overwrite this as it's meant to.

Maybe a stupid question, but why not have it utf-8 for all of them?  I 
mean, isn't that the whole point of unicode, that it just works 
everywhere?  Or does it need to match the character set of the 
messages/templates?

> There is another possibility. In recent versions prior to 2.1.13, HTML
> entities like < or ק were escaped as < or ק
> for the web interface. If this is the issue, the underlying data are
> correct; they just display incorrectly in the web admin interface.

No, this was wrong in Email messages too.  But the default English 
character set is US/ASCII so that's hardly surprising.

All this has led me to look at I18N, as it's not an area I've looked at 
before in Mailman.  And I've got a couple of questions:

1.  There's add_language lines for every supported language in 
Defaults.py, but only languages located in /etc/mailman/<languagecode> are 
actually available.  Does Mailman check for them here or is there some 
other Mailman glue that says which languages are actually available for 
use?

2.  Further to this, I can only find the template files and not the 
messages file.  Where should these be located on a Debian system?

Thanks,
Geoff.