Re: [leafnode-list] Why was support for 8 bit characters in headers

[Matthias Andree <ma@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

peter@xxxxxxxxx (Peter N. M. Hansteen) writes:

> Yes, I'm aware that practices vary. Trust me, character set issues
> have been beaten to death in the no.* hierarchy rather more thoroughly
> than in most other places. The 8 bit consensus was reached at a time
> when the only other alternative visible on the horizon was base64
> quoted-printable (aka quoted-unreadable), and was seen as a reasonable
> easily-converted-to option. Several years on, we see that flag days
> might have been acceptable before Microsoft entered the Usenet problem
> set, but today we unfortunately have to deal with an installed
> base. In short, with the current leafnode I am unable to follow up to
> a significant subset of the threads in the no.* hierarchy.

That would mean that your newsreader (presumably Gnus) would not encode
8-bit headers properly, which I find hard to believe, given that your
version is not too old, so that's a configuration issue... but read on
before delving too deep into this discussion.

> I would advocate an option to allow sending of 8 bit characters in
> headers on a per hierarchy basis. Allowing 8-bit for hierarchies such
> as no.* which for historical reasons will need them for quite some
> time to come, makes sense to me. Possibly supplemented by silently
> converting 8-bit characters to whatever is considered acceptable
> elsewhere for hierarchies where the config file does not say it is
> explicitly permitted.

I just released a new development snapshot, 1.9.25.devel20020813a
(download from http://mandree.home.pages.de/leafnode/), that has the
global "allow_8bit_headers" switch; feel free to contribute patches or
code to make this switch hierarchy-specific -- I won't do it. But beware
of postings that cross hierarchies.

And I will not implement code to munge 8bit to RFC-2047, because

a) leafnode does not know the proper character set

b) message generation is a newsreader issue, not a news server
   issue. leafnode's task is to transport things, not to falsify
   them. If it cannot do the job, it can refuse it instead rather than
   munge things.

c) I don't want to add too much complexity to leafnode 1.9.

The last reason is also the reason why I added just a global switch,
nothing specific.

-- 
Matthias Andree

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