Re: pop3.el broken

[Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>]

* Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>  on Mon, 18 Mar 2002
| Huh?  A password is a text string, entered on the keyboard.  As such, it
| must be encoded in some character set in order to be input to a hash
| function.

No, it isn't.  A pass phrase could be an 8-bit string, not necessarilly
humanly readable text, and not necessarilly entered on a keyboard.  That is
an extreme situation, but if 8-bit pass phrases are to be accepted then
this extreme must be taken into consideration.  Such a string must never be
encoded as anything.  Or, to MULEtilate it, the coding system is binary
since no-conversion doesn't mean no-conversion some of the time.

| pop3 has implicitely encoded it as ASCII traditionally, assuming that
| (md5 "foobar") encodes the characters "foobar" as ASCII characters before
| applying md5 on it.

pop3.el has never made any such assumption.  MULE may make it seem to
appear that it does, but I have long maintained that MULE is broken in this
regard.  Emacs Lisp should work identically in any Emacs without having to
work around the environment's brain-damaged assumptions.

[...]
| If you send a patch to the Emacs maintainers that modifies it to what
| you want [as long as it works] I would hope that they will unfork it.

I did, and the FSF did not.

By the way, you cannot use the FSF's version with a VAX/VMS POP server.  I
fixed that bug in 1998, but the FSF has ignored the fix after repeated
submissions.

I gave up in disgust.

[...]
| Right, I wish that XEmacs pop3.el could be reverted to your version
| (and that you would handle the bug reports ;)), and that people
| wanting enhanced behaviour could use epop3 or another package
| containing the current XEmacs pop3.el.  It is confusing to fork code
| and not change the name.

Too little, too late.  I asked them repeatedly to change the name.  They
refused, or simply ignored the request.

I gave up in disgust.

[...]
| Defadvice isn't a good long term solution.

Yes, well, given that the real problem, MULE, will never be fixed, advice
is the only solution that has a reasonable chance of working everywhere.
There are three hopelessly forked versions of pop3.el out there.  Creating
a fourth is not going to help.
-- 
Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net>    \ Happy Fun Ball contains a liquid core,
Minion of Nathan - Nathan says Hi! \ which, if exposed due to rupture, should
PGP Key: at a key server near you!  \ not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
       That and five bucks will get you a small coffee at Starbucks.