<<< Date Index >>>     <<< Thread Index >>>

Re: [Mutt] #1317: wish $edit_charset



[In the style of Vincent Lefevre...]

On Sun, Jul 05, 2009 at 01:49:22AM +0200, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> 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.

That comment is completely ridiculous.  Use iconv to convert the file
to UTF-8.  If you need to, then make your changes, and convert it
back.  It's also completely ridiculous because if everyone used
Unicode, instead of clinging to arbitrary obsolete encoding schemes,
this problem would simply not exist.

> > 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.

Ridiculous.  This is a discussion about whether Mutt should add a
feature to allow users to circumvent problems caused by their stubborn
desire to misconfigure their system, not about whether people do or do
not do so.

> 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.

Completely ridiculous, because you didn't bother to explain what you
meant by "does bad things."  Also completely ridiculous because even
if an application has a bug, it can and should be fixed; not blame the
mechanism it tries to use for the fault.

> > 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. 

This remark is completely ridiculous.

> First because Mutt is one of the applications that break under a
> UTF-8 locale (see above). 

Utterly ridiculous.  Even if Mutt has some small number of minor bugs
pertaining to character set handling, it can hardly be generally
called broken under UTF-8.  Also riducluous because it should have
been clear from context that "broken" in this case meant "unusably
broken" which Mutt clearly is not.

> 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.

Completely ridiculous.  You're describing a case where all the
available choices are severely broken.  In any case, you should
complain to the vendor(s) to fix them, since they are unusable.

> Anyway since Mutt allows the user to run it under non-UTF-8 locales,
> using such locales should be assumed to be OK.

Ridiculous.  The context of this discussion is using one charset
*while needing to use another which is not contained in the selected
one.*  Obviously other charsets can be chosen and used, but as stated
several times already, that only makes sense if you only need to
interact with that specific character set.  Otherwise, you WILL at
some point encounter problems.
 
> > 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. 

Completely ridiculous (and also very rude, but we expect that from
you).

> 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.

This is unbelievably ridiculous. If a user wants to create an invalid
XML file with an incorrect encoding, he should be able to.  It may be
the case that he wants to do so as an example of a bad XML file, or
for whatever reason; but regardless his editor should not prevent him
from doing so.  But that's beside the point.  Editors may or may not
do this, but they must also be able to output the charset to the
user's terminal.  If they're using a strictly ISO-8859-1 terminal, for
example, and the file they are editing contains Cyrillic characters,
this will simply be impossible.  But all editors must determine the
locale that the user is using in order to display files properly to
the user, regardless of what encoding the file is in or what encoding
the editor uses internally.  All non-broken editors do this, and do it
by evaluating $LANG and friends.

> 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. 

Ridiculous, like absolutely everything else you said, because it
doesn't address my point at all.


-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
-=-=-=-=-
This message is posted from an invalid address.  Replying to it will result in
undeliverable mail due to spam prevention.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Attachment: pgpSB7JOWE6mU.pgp
Description: PGP signature