Re: 21.5 crash in Gnus

[TSUCHIYA Masatoshi <tsuchiya@namazu.org>]

>> On Thu, 20 Jul 2006 21:18:43 +0200
>> reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc (Reiner Steib) said as follows:

>>> `charset' parameter of this MML tag is used to specify the `charset'
>>> parameter of the top level `Content-Type' header.
>>
>> Yes that works quite well, no mime parts created, correct mime headers
>> generated...

>But if you include characters that are not present in this charset,
>those will be replaced by question marks, see
><news:v9y7uo3xed.fsf@marauder.physik.uni-ulm.de> in gmane.test.

Yes, of course.

If a user specify his/her favorite encoding, it is his/her job to
select an encoding that can represent all characters in his/her
message, I think.  If a user specify no encoding, it is Gnus's job to
select an appropriate one according to `mm-coding-system-priorities'.

>I wonder why people have the need to specify the charset in the first
>place.

I show an example.  Because almost of all messages written in Japanese
are encoded in ISO-2022-JP, mail users in Japan will select
ISO-2022-JP as an normal-use encoding as Gnus also selects.
Unfortunately, a broken mailer cannot process messages encoded in
ISO-2022-JP, but can process messages in UTF-8.  When a user has to
send a message to another user using that broken mailer, he/she will
want to select UTF-8 temporally.

-- 
TSUCHIYA Masatoshi