[Lynx-dev] lynx newspost:// does not correctly encode non-7bit chars

[Thorsten Glaser]

Hi,

I discovered newsreply:// and newspost:// today and couldn’t resist
testing it: news://news.gmane.org/address@hidden

The nōn-7bit-ASCII characters break, and I can trace the real cause
of the breakage back to lynx. It really should encode the messages
as quoted-printable if and only if they contain non-7bit chars (as
MIME is otherwise still frowned upon in the Usenet).

Apparently, post_article() in W/L/I/HTNews.c is the culprit, but it
doesn’t handle the input at all. I believe I can change it to do
what I want, if you’d accept such a patch. One thing I’d need to
know is how to get the “current charset” (i.e. the one Lynx believes
the texteditor wrote).

Also, it doesn’t properly decode either:
news://news.gmane.org/address@hidden

This might be read_article() in the same file. It doesn’t do MIME
even for the bare Content-Transfer-Encoding minimum. I believe I
could change it to parse at least nōn-multipart messages in either
quoted-printable or base64 correctly, but then I’ve got a charset
to indicate to Lynx; how would I pass that on?

Another thing I’m missing, compared with reading nntp via pine,
is that lynx doesn’t offer to view the raw article, like this:

--- snip ---
# call this with one of:
#       getarticle gmane.foo.bar 1234
#       getarticle $message_id
# ensure ~/mail/x can be a unix/mbox format mail folder we append to

ns=news.gmane.org
if [[ $1 = -n ]]; then
        ns=ncnntp
        shift
fi

if (( $# == 2 )); then
        printf 'mode reader\r\ngroup %s\r\narticle %d\r\nquit\r\n' "$1" "$2"
elif [[ $1 = */+([0-9]) ]]; then
        printf 'mode reader\r\ngroup %s\r\narticle %d\r\nquit\r\n' "${1%/*}" 
"${1##*/}"
else
        printf 'mode reader\r\narticle <%s>\r\nquit\r\n' "$1"
fi | \
    nc $ns 119 | sed -e $'s/\r$//' -e '1,/^[^0-9]/d' -e '/^\.$/,$d' | \
    (date -u +'From MAILER-DAEMON %a %b %e %H:%M:%S %Y'; cat) >>~/mail/x
--- snip ---

This can be useful in debugging, or manually decoding messages
Lynx cannot parse. No idea how to add that best; the URL scheme
news://server/msgid isn’t really extensible, but newsraw:// might
be possible. I don’t currently offer an attempt at a patch.

bye,
//mirabilos
-- 
Sorry,  I’m annoyed today and you came by as an Arch user. These are the
perfect victims for any crime against humanity, like  systemd,  feminism
or social democracy.
                -- Christoph Lohmann on address@hidden