For English-speaking countries UTF-8, in majority, means ASCII,
they can see no difference. As an advantage they can use foreign
names like Moebius in original, this makes message more readable.
But I'm afraid they wouldn't be happy with message written in
Russian, Chinese or Korean.
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but I can handle UTF-8 fine
(I got some spam recently in some variant of Arabic and it displayed
just fine).
In fact, I know very little about API, so it might be difficult.
But restrict the entire nmh to utf-8 charset would cripple system.
It's not a "restriction", per se ... it's more about the internal
representation. It's easy enough to call iconv() (or whatever) to
convert UTF-8 to and from the native character set.
Beside the information on charset inside API, from my point
of view the correct, and too much resource consumig, is move out
module for conversion outside, as separate program. The default
program would convert to utf-8, but anyone can provide his own
program for conversion according to his taste. Suppose an entry in
.mh_profile mh-text-convert: prog
Yeah, that's doesn't really solve the problem in any meaningful way.
Conversion isn't the problem (most Unix systems today have access to
an API which does that for you).
There is a good chunk of code inside of nmh that assumes ASCII (in
terms of "what is a space", "what is a newline", and other things).
Given the existing APIs today, handling multiple character sets
within this code would require a lot of work. That's why I am
proposing making the internal representation UTF-8. Now my plan
was to convert from UTF-8 to the native character set, but that
conversion won't be perfect.
So here's my general feeling: since I'm writing the code, I'm the one
who makes the decisions. If you (or anyone else) wants to write the
code, then hey, you can make the decisions - you won't hear a peep
out of me. Otherwise, you can give me your OPINION, and I'll listen to
it, but I'll still be the one making the ultimate decision.
--Ken
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