Re: "> > >" space removal removes too many spaces?

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:

>> I've just implemented this logic (at least I think so).
> 
> Looks nice.

Fine.  Kai, do you think it's okay to commit it?

>> Does RFC 2646 really try to solve the problem this way?  In this
>> case, the RFC is horribly broken.  Attaching semantic to QP encoding
>> vs. not-encoding is clearly an extremely bad idea, and it certainly
>> contradicts the spirit of MIME.
> 
> No, I think that approach is suggested in a couple of places, RFC 2015
> being the only one I can find now (they use it to protect "From").

This is a detail at the transport layer.  RFC 2015 (and, in
particular, its successor) doesn't fit nicely into the MIME
environment anyway.

> RFC 2646 suggests an alternate approach, space-stuffing the lines.  It
> might be cleaner, but it's (slightly) less visually pleasing to
> non-RFC 2646 clients.  The idea above looks good on all clients that
> support QP.

But your approach is not compatible with MIME, and RFC 2646 is.  I
think the following is required by MIME (implicitly or explicitly, I
don't know): The transfer encoding shall not alter the semantics of a
part, and no information shall be lost during decoding.  This goes
along with the possiblity of one-pass processing, and it greatly
simplifies the implementation of MIME agents.

RFCs 2015 and 2646 adhere to this, your proposal does not, I'm afraid.