Re: [Mutt] #3040: charset difference between index browser and pager
#3040: charset difference between index browser and pager
Comment (by Derek Martin):
{{{
On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 01:00:29AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> On 2008-03-22 16:28:43 +0100, Thomas Roessler wrote:
> > The user isn't assumed to run under UTF-8. The user is assumed to
> > run in a consistent environment in which the terminal, the file
> > system, and local files share a single character set which is
> > inferred from the user's locale settings.
>
> This is absolute non-sense!
That statement is stupid, annoying, and inflammatory. What Thomas
described is how Unix is designed to work. It's not nonsense. If
your locale settings are not consistent, you should expect to have
problems.
> In particular nowadays, where files (e.g. mail messages) often come
> from remote people, who may use various encodings.
That's what iconv is for. If you're not using a unicode environment,
you're making a concious choice that only data encoded in the locale
you've selected matters to you. The iconv library will happily
convert the characters it can, and replace ones it can't with a
character indicating such. If your character set doesn't contain all
of the world's possible characters, that's the best you can hope for
(which is why Unicode was created).
If you're a native French speaker, concerned that someone will send
you a mail in EUC-JP and you won't be able to read the characters in
it, switch your settings to a unicode environment. You don't have to,
but it's the ONLY WAY what you want will work.
If you only care to be able to read ISO-8559-1 encoded data, then
using that environment, and configuring your locale consistently for
it, works perfectly fine. If you've chosen to use ISO-8859-1, and you
care about other encodings, then you're clearly either uninformed
about how locales work in Unix, have constraints placed upon you by
outside factors (i.e. work reqirements), or you're just an idiot.
There are solutions to the first two problems...
}}}
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Ticket URL: <http://dev.mutt.org/trac/ticket/3040#comment:>