[Python-Dev] utf-8 encoding in checkins?

[Georg Brandl]

On 27.03.2011 18:33, Jon Ribbens wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 27, 2011 at 05:21:08PM +0200, Antoine Pitrou wrote:
>> On Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:06:49 -0500
>> skip at pobox.com wrote:
>> > It seems that all checkin mails are utf-8-encoded.  This makes it
>> > challenging to view checkin mails if you have a text-based mail reader.  (I
>> > use VM within XEmacs.  XEmacs doesn't seem to support utf-8 out of the box.
>> > I believe you need to add MULE to it.)
>> 
>> Hmm, are you sure? Software (especially mail-reading software) that
>> doesn't support utf-8 in 2011 should be considered extremely broken.
>> 
>> (I understand you may be a native English speaker, but do you never
>> receive non-ASCII utf-8 e-mail at all? doesn't it get displayed
>> properly?)
> 
> In my experience it is very difficult to get a whole system
> configured, such that UTF-8 works reliably. In my case that would
> mean, I think, Linux, glibc, mutt, screen, elinks, and SecureCRT would
> all have to simultaneously be configured precisely correctly in order
> to get it to work. I have certainly never managed it, anyway.

But surely there is a difference between input and output encoding?
Even if a mail program cannot output UTF-8 correctly (due to whatever
misconfiguration in the output chain), it should still be able to
read base-64 encoded utf-8 blocks, and display most of them, even if
the odd non-ASCII character is broken.

> Mind you, I've never managed to get the <-- button working reliably
> either, but to be fair that's insanely complicated too.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with that button.

Georg