Re: Charset encoding brokenness

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Jesper Harder <harder@ifa.au.dk> writes:

> So the question is: how to forward/digest/etc correctly without
> converting to mml?
>
> I think `mime-to-mml' is the wrong thing for most purposes for a
> variety of reasons:
>
> 1. When I ask someone to forward a message, I usually want a
>    _verbatim_ copy, not an interpretation by Gnus.
>
> 2. `mime-to-mml' assumes that the message is actually valid MIME.
>
> 3. It's broken for pgp/mime.
>
> The last problem could probably be fixed by some special-casing.  But
> the other two remain.

Yes; mime-to-mml shouldn't be used unless MML will be shown in the
forwarded message buffer.  The C-c C-f docstring is quite
disappointing, so I experimented some, and I came up with more
detailed descriptions of the modes:

if ARG is nil,

  If m-f-a-m=t and m-f-s-m=best, this selects between ARG=2 and ARG=3
  below depending on if MML is safe.  I haven't thought through what
  it should do for the remaining 2*3-1=5 cases.

if ARG is 1,

  "Gnus specific ASCII purist".  This wrap a MML decoded message in a
  ASCII header/footer.  I can't begin to understand why anyone would
  want this.  For any non-trivial MIME message, I doubt any MUA but
  Gnus would render this in any understandable way.

if ARG is 2,

  "MIME purist".  Wrap raw body in MML application/rfc822 part.  No
  MML decoding within body.

if ARG is 3,

  "MML purist". Wrap MML-decoded body in MML application/rfc822 part.

if ARG is 4,

  "ASCII purist in debug mode". Wrap gnus-original-article-buffer
  within ASCII forward headers.

if ARG is 5 (not currently supported)

  "Forward-What-I-See, ASCII purist".  This should use whatever is in
  the Gnus *Article* buffer.  It should NOT try to decode the message
  in gnus-original-article-buffer again.  No MML tags whatsoever, the
  forward header should be pure ASCII.

The problem in implementing 5 appear to be getting the *Article*
buffer down into message.el, since currently it only has access to
gnus-original-article-buffer which isn't sufficient.

We might consider swapping ARG=1 and ARG=5, since the ARG=1 above is
quite weird, but this wouldn't be backwards compatible so maybe we
shouldn't.

Of course, then there is the problem of \345 characters instead of
decoded data.  Will think about that once I understand more.