Re: changing gnus-group-posting-charset-alist

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

The scales dropped from my eyes.  That's a Japanese expression
meaning that misunderstandings were removed from my mind (in
this case, scale is a skin of a big fish).

>>>>> In <m3sm8b69xw.fsf@defun.localdomain> Jesper Harder wrote:

> Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org> writes:

>>| gnus-group-posting-charset-alist's value is
>>| (("^\\(no\\|fr\\)..." iso-8859-1 (iso-8859-1))
>>|  ("^\\(fido7\\|relcom\\)..." koi8-r (koi8-r))
>>|  (message-this-is-mail nil nil)
>>|  (message-this-is-news nil t))
>>
>> Is it still necessary not to encode text by qp or something to
>> post news articles to no, fr, fido7 and relcom newsgroups?

> I think the reason for the special entries isn't CTE=QP as such, but
> that those hierarchies don't want rfc2047-encoded headers.

I see.  Using such charsets is an agreement in those groups,
isn't it?

>> As for other newsgroups, Gnus forces the 8bit encoding especially
>> to news articles' body by default.  Isn't it a vestige of the
>> time when Gnus had not been multiligualized?  It is hard for me
>> to imagine there's a difference between mail and news.

> The major difference is that NNTP is 8bit-clean whereas SMTP isn't.
> Or more precisely: The NNTP draft standard states that NNTP is
> 8bit-clean (which has been true for a long time).  The SMTP standard
> says you shouldn't use 8bit in email except when the server supports
> the ESMTP extension 8BITMIME.

Indeed.  I noticed we can send anything by news, specifying a
charset explicitly or implicitly.  The value `t' will mean Gnus
is not restricted to 7bit rather than forcing 8bit into Gnus.
Now I think the value is very just.

> In practice SMTP probably _is_ 8bit-clean today -- but we wouln't want
> a heavily armed IETF squad team knocking at the door because we're
> violating RFC 2821.  Which is why we use CTE=QP.

I see.  Supposing there're still MTAs that don't handle 8bit,
what do you think about posting articles to Gmane groups?  I got
to feel that it does not matter. ;-)

>> Almost Japanese text which I write can be encoded by iso-2022-jp
>> and 7bit.  So, those text will be posted as 7bit articles.
>> However, I sometimes followup to articles containing characters
>> which cannot be encoded by 7bit.  In those cases, text will be
>> encoded by shift_jis, utf-8 and so forth and fed to the server
>> without being encoded with qp or base64.  A newsreader posting
>> such articles may be only Gnus nowadays.

> It's interesting that your perspective is the opposite of mine: I see
> QP mainly as an annoying concession to maybe a few old SMTP servers
> which still aren't 8bit-clean.  If possible I'd prefer 8bit
> everywhere, because you can use the text directly without decoding it
> first, for example you can grep your mailbox directly.

That's right.  Anyway, I appreciate having made me enlightened.

> I'm not saying that you're wrong, but that this preference is probably
> locale-dependent.

And it is perhaps personal-ism-dependent, now I think.