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[fetchmail]'\r' in internationalized messages (was: Security patch to gold version?)

2001-08-14 12:58:44
On Fri, Aug 10, 2001 at 19:37:43 -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
Matthias Andree <ma(_at_)dt(_dot_)e-technik(_dot_)uni-dortmund(_dot_)de>:
"Eric S. Raymond" <esr(_at_)thyrsus(_dot_)com> writes:

Yes.  I plan to release 5.9.0 in the very near future -- in fact, if 
I don't hear about a recurrence of the damn gettext-related build bugs,
I might ship it tomorrow.

I'm getting a lot of these:

internationalized messages should not contain the `\r' escape sequence

from xgettext.

Should I bother?

No. It's a minor cosmetic bug.  I'll address it after 5.9.0.

Well, gettext, xgettext etc. works fine with \r even though they
complain.

Translators using emacs's po-mode cannot type \r in their
translations, but there are simple ways to overcome this such as
turning off po-mode in emacs.

However one problem exists that is not just cosmetic. The messsages
which contain \r are texts which may be mailed to the user by
fetchmail. Fetchmail delivers the e-mails generated by itself in
the same way as it delivers fetched mail. This is a problem when
the translated messages are send by for example SMTP -- the used
charset often has changed from ASCII to something else which is
illegal to send without encoding etc.

I suppose that the best solution is /not/ to handle this in
fetchmail, but to deliver self-generated mail to a MUA which knowns
how to treat messages in the local charset.

Programs -- even an MTA like fetchmail -- should not deliver
generated mail directly to an MTA.

Best regards
Byrial Jensen,
Maintainer of the Danish translation of fetchmail.