Re: nntp servers with multibyte group names?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Adam Sjøgren <asjo@koldfront.dk> writes:

> Eric writes:
>
>>>   "o  Although this specification allows UTF-8 for newsgroup names, they
>>>       SHOULD be restricted to US-ASCII until a successor to RFC 1036
>>>       [RFC1036] standardises another approach. 8-bit encodings SHOULD
>>>       NOT be used because they are likely to cause interoperability
>>>       problems."
>>>
>>>      - https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3977#section-10
>>
>> Interesting! Thanks for that (I guess I could have looked that up
>> myself).
>
> I was curious to find the answer, as I apparently have a hobby of
> implementing an nntp-interface on average every half a decade :-)

Sounds like... fun. But it also sounds like you might be able to answer
some of my questions!

>> I will assume for now that group names are coming in as ascii, but
>> maybe leave a note in the code.
>
> Why not assume utf-8 (of which ascii is a subset, I believe)?

I am miserable at encoding-related programming, it's something I've
never really had to deal with, and I don't grok it.

For instance:

`nntp-make-process-buffer' disables multibyte, then
`nntp-open-connection' sets both `coding-system-for-read' and
`coding-system-for-write' to 'binary. This makes sense: everything is
unibyte.

If leave multibyte enabled, then set both coding-systems to 'utf-8, will
that just magically work? Doesn't it depend to some extent on what the
remote server is sending over the wire? Do I need to negotiate with the
server somehow, or will Emacs have already taken care of that for me, in
`open-network-stream'?

(This is also something I should be asking on emacs.help, I guess.)

Thanks for any light you're willing to shed!

Eric