GNATS and MIME

[Yngve Svendsen]

This went to bug-gnats yesterday, but I'm sending this to gnats-devel as 
well, since it contains a request for volunteers to look into a problem 
(see the end of the message).

Anyone out there with a little bit of coding experience and a tiny bit of 
spare time?

At 17:01 19.02.2001 +0100, Palle Girgensohn wrote:
> Hi!
>
> Has anyone tried to get gnats to behave more politely with
> MIMEified mails. Now, it will not work at all if the subject is
> mimified (by for example, correctly embedding Swedish åäö
> characters with ?ISO?8859... stuff). Also, messages can look
> pretty ugly, with lots of '=E5' for every ä etc...
>
> I'm running 3.113. Will this behave better in version 4? Has
> anyone patched gnats?
>
> /Palle

Use a script to translate quoted printables. The following little Perl 
script does this (yes, it might be tad unelegant, but it works):

#########################
#!/usr/bin/perl

use MIME::QuotedPrint ();
while (<>) {
  $line = $_;
  $line =~ s/=\?iso-8859-1\?Q\?//i;
  $line =~ s/\?=//g;

  if ($line =~ /^Subject/ ) {
      $line =~ tr/_/ /;
  };

  if ($line =~ /^From/ ) {
      $line =~ tr/_/ /;
  };

  $line = MIME::QuotedPrint::decode($line);

  print $line;
};

########################

Then set up the mail alias which receives bug reports to pipe messages 
through this script before it is piped into queue-pr. Like this:

| /path-to-script/script.pl | /usr/local/libexec/gnats/queue-pr -q

Warning: this seems to break recognition of PR numbers when people reply by 
mail to PRs. I believe this to be because the routine in file-pr that 
handles mail subject recognition breaks down when it encounters anything 
beyond 7-bit ASCII. The consequence is that if a PR that has such 
characters in the Subject is replied to by mail, file-pr will create a new 
problem report with a new number. A workaround is to remove the qp 
translation of the Subject line in the script above.

I haven't looked at the Subject recognition problem, so if someone else 
would care to take a peek at file-pr.c and see if they can find a solution, 
I'd be thankful.

Yngve Svendsen
IS Engineer
Clustra AS, Trondheim, Norway
address@hidden