Re: [Nmh-workers] More fun with charset functions

[Ken Hornstein]

>We really need to look at the causes and effects, and see what solution is
>all around best.   Here, as you (or maybe someone else) said in an earlier
>message (and again below), using "unknown-8bit" (whether technically
>permitted or not) just shifts the burden onto the mail reader - think of
>what we do when receiving a message that has a charset set that way.  How
>are we supposed to correctly display that message to the user?   How is
>anyone else?   This cannot possibly be the right thing to do.

Here's the deal.

Yes, I agree with you: the core problem is someone is using 8-bit
characters with a US-ASCII locale, and that's a misconfiguration.  It
should be corrected; we should throw an error.  Thinking about it more,
it's more sensible that we do that; it's easier to throw errors like
this when you're dealing with individual tools versus monolithic MUAs.
The problem is right now, architecturally, it's hard (see previous
email).  We should fix that.  But we SHOULD do lots of things; time
is finite.  Returning US-ASCII for 8-bit characters is super-wrong.
Returning "unknown-8bit" is at least valid according to the RFCs.  We
can always go back and fix that later (that DOES happen, although the
time frame can be large).

--Ken