Re: charset=macintosh

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>
>> But what if you are saying about UTF-8 clients being MIME capable is
>> true, and since UTF-8 is typically never preferred by current emacsen,
>> doesn't emacs' current guessing works the best we can hope for?
>> Doesn't it detect among ISO-8859-X, ISO-2022 and Big5 properly?
>
> No.  I was hoping we could do something like this (for headers):
>
> (let ((coding-systems (detect-coding-string string)))
>   (if (memq default coding-systems)
>       (decode-coding-string string default)
>     (decode-coding-string string (car coding-systems))))
>
> i.e. if the default coding system is valid for the string, then use
> that; otherwise use whatever Emacs thinks is the most likely coding
> system.  I think this would be ideal.

Yes.  (Except for the current UTF-8 bug, of course)

> But unfortunately `detect-coding-string' _doesn't_ return a complete
> list of possible coding systems.  Consider this scenario: 
>
>   I'm using Emacs in a Latin-1 locale.  dk.* newsgroups work fine
>   because latin-1 is the default.  But I also subscribe to, say, a few
>   Korean newsgroups.  The entry in `gnus-groups-charset-alist':
>
>          ("\\(^\\|:\\)han\\>" euc-kr)
>
>   should take care of selecting the proper default charset.  But *oops*,
>   `detect-coding-string' doesn't think that euc-kr is a possible charset
>   for a Korean string encoded in euc-kr:
>
>        (detect-coding-string (encode-coding-string "안녕" 'euc-kr))
>        => (iso-latin-1 iso-latin-1 raw-text japanese-shift-jis 
>            chinese-big5 no-conversion)
>
> So the above approach would fail.

I wonder if this isn't another bug.  Maybe you could report it as a
bug?

>>   2) Users with emacs in UTF-8 prefers UTF-8 too often, even when the
>>      data is invalid UTF-8 and another encoding should be selected.
>>
>> The second situation is a bug, and I hope we can fix this.
>
> Yep, 2) is the most serious problem.  Especially because more and more
> people are (often unknowingly) using an UTF-8 locale because Redhat 8
> switched to UTF-8 by default.  Those people would experience Gnus as
> broken when reading hierarchies like dk.* or de.*.

Fortunately we can blame it on emacs, and the PROBLEMS entry.  Not so
for Emacs 21.3 though, which has removed the entry but the behaviour
is the same.  But this should be fixed..