Re: charset=macintosh

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Jorge Godoy <godoy@metalab.unc.edu> writes:

> kai.grossjohann@uni-duisburg.de (Kai Großjohann) writes:
>
>> Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:
>>
>>>    Just because you're using UTF-8, mac-roman, EBCDIC or whatever on
>>>    your local system doesn't mean that it's a good guess that you'll
>>>    receive mail and news using this charset.  
>>
>> I think this guess is better than no guess at all.
>>
>> Do you have a better guess?
>
> Isn't it obligatory to fill in the charset at message headers?
> Instead of guessing, Gnus should --- I think it already does --- use
> this information to choose the charset.

Yes, and Gnus does this.  I think the thread is about when this
information isn't available, which in some communities can be a large
proportion.

> If nothing is filled, them use the locale the use is in and add a
> notice that the message has an obligatory information missing.

Gnus should be more helpful, and already is since it allows certain
hierarchies to use other charsets (see `gnus-group-charset-alist').

For articles without MIME tags, in groups not in g-g-c-a, it would be
nice if Gnus could guess better -- like trying to UTF-8 decode it,
which typically only fails when data wasn't UTF-8 encoded, and then go
on and try other encodings.  Emacs' decoding functions behave a little
strange, but onces fixed Gnus should be able to do this.