[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: RMAIL bails out with coding-system-error
From: |
Simon Josefsson |
Subject: |
Re: RMAIL bails out with coding-system-error |
Date: |
Sun, 05 May 2002 17:11:50 +0200 |
User-agent: |
Gnus/5.090007 (Oort Gnus v0.07) XEmacs/21.4 (Economic Science, i686-pc-linux) |
Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:
> On Sun, 5 May 2002, Simon Josefsson wrote:
>
>> Is this X-Coding-System header actually used by RMAIL for anything?
>
> Yes, it is used to set the value of buffer-file-coding-system when you
> read the same message later. Without this, RMAIL would have to
> repeatedly decode messages each time you display it; this would be a
> nuisance with long messages.
>
> In addition, recording an encoding allows features like
> rmail-redecode-body, that lets users override bogus MIME headers.
I wasn't clear, I meant: Is it used for anything upon receiving a
message with that header from the network via email?
Using it internally after receiving the message is OK, I think.
>> I think the header is a very bad idea and it should be removed. There
>> is a standard for interchanging non-ASCII data using email, and it is
>> called MIME. Inventing something new that is specific to emacs (and
>> can even depend on which additional packages are installed..) is a
>> perfect method to cause problems for users and make people reject the
>> entire software because it doesn't follow standards.
>
> IIRC, the X-Coding-System header is only written to the BABYL-formatted
> files Emacs keeps for itself, and then only in the summary part. What
> kinds of problems do you envision with this, given that headers beginning
> with "X-" can be used by applications for their own purposes?
None. I thought RMAIL decided how to display an incoming email
depending on the X-Coding-System header. This is what would cause
problems.
Of course, RMAIL should probably make sure that X-Coding-System is
removed when forwarding messages, so other RMAIL instances isn't
confused. Or at least remove it on incoming messages before adding
the new header locally.
> However, I'm not saying that this is the only possible way of recording
> the message encoding. If there are more standard methods that can
> support the same features, we could consider switching to them.
For internal purposes, whatever works is OK. Switching to MIME for
the internal representation seems like work with little gain.
>> Gnus provides
>> two supposedly standalone packages called Message and Emacs MIME which
>> provides MIME encoding and decoding, can't RMAIL use them?
>
> The difference between RMAIL and Gnus is that RMAIL stores only the
> decoded messages. It doesn't keep the undecoded copy around. But I
> don't know if this should prevent the change of the kind you suggest.
Ok. I misunderstood the purposes of the header.
Re: RMAIL bails out with coding-system-error, Eli Zaretskii, 2002/05/05