Re: [Nmh-workers] RFC 2047 vs RFC 2231 encoding for MIME parameters

[Ken Hornstein]

>I see plenty of sources of heartburn if somebody sends a filename with
>Hebrew characters in whatever 8859-foo (-8?), to somebody in a UTF-8
>environment.  Unlike textual data intended to be read, where "decode
>to recipient's locale" makes sense, when it's a filename things get
>stickier, because there can be external references (indexes, etc) that
>point at a filename in a particular encoding - or even the 2047-encoded
>string as the filename. :)

I am not sure this is within the scope of nmh; I mean, it's a general
problem that exists even if you use RFC 2231 encoding.  Also ... I'm
unclear from your response if you are a +1 or -1 on the idea of nmh
automatically decoding RFC-2047 encoded filenames, which was my original
query :-)

Regarding filenames lacking locale (really, I think you mean character
set), that is no longer true.  I see a number of network filesystems
start to enforce UTF-8 (really, the only sane choice) and more Unix-like
operating systems are doing the same for local filesystems (MacOS and
Solaris are the ones that I'm aware of).  Really, I think that's where
things will ultimately end up.

--Ken