[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces

[Antoine Pitrou]

Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen <at> xemacs.org> writes:
> 
> If
> you see a broken encoding once, you're likely to see it a million times
> (spammers have the most broken software) or maybe have it raise an
> unhandled Exception a dozen times (in rate of using busted software,
> the spammers are closely followed by bosses---which would be very bad,
> eh, if you 2/3 of the mail from your boss ends up in an undeliverables
> queue due to encoding errors that are unhandled by your some filter in
> your mail pipeline).

I'm not sure how mail being stuck in a pipeline has anything to do with Martin's
proposal (which deals with file paths, not with SMTP...).
Besides, I don't care about spammers and their broken software.

> Again, that's not the point.  The point is that six-sigma reliability
> world-wide is not going to be very comforting to the poor souls who
> happen to have broken software in their environment sending broken
> encodings regularly, because they're going to be dealing with one or
> two sigmas, and that's just not good enough in a production
> environment.

So you're arguing that whatever solution which isn't 100% perfect but only
99.999% perfect shouldn't be implemented at all, and leave the status quo at
98%? This sounds disturbing to me.

(especially given you probably sent this mail using TCP/IP...)

Regards

Antoine.