Re: [Mutt] #1317: wish $edit_charset
On 2009-07-02 14:19:29 -0500, Derek Martin wrote:
> Exactly. Any time you are trying to deal with a different encoding
> from the one your system is configured to use, you're asking for
> trouble.
That's why one may need to switch between different locales (e.g. for
grep), because not all files use the same charset. Some files are
remote files, shared by several users, and one doesn't necessarily
has the choice.
> A tremendous amount of e-mail appears on mutt-users and mutt-dev
> exactly because of this problem. The overwhelming majority of that
> e-mail would disappear if people would just stop trying to do things
> that are inherently broken...
If some users don't know how to configure their system, complain to
them, not here.
> Also, this option was added at a time when it made more sense; it was
> added in 2003 or before, IIRC, and at the time dealing with different
> encodings was painful, and getting UTF-8 working on all but the latest
> bleeding edge distros was also painful. It is, IMNSHO, obsolete.
> Don't get me wrong -- I believe in supporting legacy code whenver it's
> reasonable to do so... I'll be one of the first to complain when
> something breaks legacy code. But you shouldn't necessarily try to
> bridge the gap between the legacy and the modern. With regards to
> character sets, Mutt already does support the legacy.
I don't know what you mean here, but by default, Mutt does bad things
with charsets. The $thorough_search variable is broken by design and
should be removed.
> Now, if a user stubbornly insists on using some legacy application
> that really does actually break under a UTF-8 locale (this should be
> pretty rare by now), that is and should be regarded as the user's
> problem...
This remark is ridiculous. First because Mutt is one of the
applications that break under a UTF-8 locale (see above). Then because
one doesn't necessarily have the choice; even when there are other
similar applications that have no problems with UTF-8, they may have
more important bugs so that they can't be used.
Anyway since Mutt allows the user to run it under non-UTF-8 locales,
using such locales should be assumed to be OK.
> I think you have to assume exactly that: All of the "normal" editors
> DO derive their encoding from $LANG... all the major vi clones, emacs
> and xemacs, jed, joe, pico, all the usual CDE-, KDE- and Gnome-shipped
> editors. Any editor which does not is *broken*, and Mutt should not
> concern itself with supporting that.
Wrong. For instance, editors must respect the encoding of XML files
(which is provided with the file in some way), and doing something
else would be against the XML spec.
Now more generally, emacs (and probably others) can be configured to
use an encoding declared by user to *match* the encoding of the file.
Saying that it is broken would be stupid. Note: again, Mutt is
concerned by this point (e.g. the "edit" command).
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.org/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.org/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arenaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)