Re: [Nmh-workers] mhshow/test-charset failures in nmh-1.7 (`Can't convert ?us-ascii to UTF-8')

[Ralph Corderoy]

Hi David,

> > > mhshow: Can't convert ?us-ascii to UTF-8
> > > mhshow: unable to convert character set from ?us-ascii, continuing...
>
> That was the intent, too.  Based on Ralph's (re-?)discovery that the
> charset name gets normalised by GNU iconv

It is all hazily familiar having worked it out again.  Unfortunately,
searching the nmh-workers archive is still broken;  I've emailed admin.

Does anyone know if the nmh function is substituting `?' for dodgy
characters *expecting* that GNU iconv will later drop those so a valid,
if not intended, charset might result?  Or is it just a method of
passing the error up to the user in a way that shows where the dodgy
characters were and this normalising is just messing that up?

If the former, we should fix it so the error really does reach the user.

If the latter, that seems broken because we don't know the right charset
will result, and it means the behaviour varies between platforms and
iconv implementations for the same email.  If the platform has
`ISO-8859-1' and the email `iso88591' then that's a platform problem
that they normally fix, e.g. with a local alias file;  not nmh's
problem.

-- 
Cheers, Ralph.
https://plus.google.com/+RalphCorderoy