Re: charset ANSI_x3.4-1968, et al

[Simon Josefsson <simon@josefsson.org>]

Karl Chen <quarl@cs.berkeley.edu> writes:

>>>>>> On 2007-03-19 01:43 PDT, Simon Josefsson writes:
>
>     Simon> I looked at a cleaner way to solve this.  Can you test
>     Simon> the patch below?
>
> Thank you, yes, I tried it and it gets rid of the warning message,
> but...
>
>     Simon>  (defcustom mm-charset-override-alist
> [..]
>     Simon> - (iso-8859-9 . windows-1254))
>     Simon> + (iso-8859-9 . windows-1254)
>     Simon> + (ansi_x3.4-1968 . us-ascii))
>
> I'm not sure it's "cleaner": as far as I can tell
> mm-charset-override-alist is intended to be a user-level override
> list.  For example, there could be aliases for iso-8859-1, but the
> user shouldn't have to manually list all aliases to "override"
> into windows-1252.  If the user wants to override us-ascii to
> something else he'd have to manually add mappings for all the
> us-ascii aliases.  I think it'd be cleaner (in terms of semantics,
> maybe not patch size) to keep "override alist" and "alias alist"
> separate.

I'm not sure there are two separate lists here.  As far as I
understand, there is only one MIME charset name.  All the other
aliases are not intended for MIME, and should never be used for MIME.
For compatibility, we could add overrides for such aliases, if they
are common, though, but conceptually it is wrong to think of them as
"aliases".  They are "overrides".

However, I do agree that using user variables for this is a bad idea
-- if the user customizes the variable in one Gnus version, and we add
compatibility mappings in a later version, they will miss the new
mappings.

However, I can think of users that do not want to map ansi_x3.4-1968
to us-ascii, for the same reason some users do not want to map
iso-8859-9 to windows-1254, so whatever we come up with, it should be
possible for users to customize it.

/Simon