Re: smtpmail and ~/.authinfo

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:08:30 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> wrote: 

>> From: Ted Zlatanov <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sun, 25 Sep 2011 08:21:36 -0500
>> 
>> I don't think the SMTP interaction should not be the critical factor
>> here.  The SMTP library should deal with invalid (for SMTP) characters
>> on its side; many other libraries and protocols use `auth-source-search'
>> that can handle non-ASCII characters.  In other words, let's not limit
>> the capabilities of `auth-source-search' just because one of the users
>> can't handle non-ASCII.
>> 
>> I think authinfo/netrc files should be portable and support Unicode in a
>> way that enables other (older or new!) software to use them too.  IMHO
>> enforcing UTF-8 encoding is the best way to achieve that.

EZ> Fine with me, but then Someone™ should simultaneously modify smtpmail
EZ> (and perhaps also other users of authinfo) to DTRT when communicating
EZ> with the SMTP server, whatever "TRT" may mean in this case.  Do one,
EZ> but not the other, and we will have a bug waiting to happen on our

I have a pretty good handle on the `auth-source-search' users in the
Emacs space.  More importantly, this makes no difference on the API
user's side.  With raw-text they also get potentially unsafe characters,
right?  We're just going to enforce UTF-8 as the non-ASCII encoding and
in the case of ASCII data UTF-8 is the same as unencoded.

Could you help me (or point me to the right examples) to:

- always create/write a file in UTF-8 on every platform

- opportunistically open the file in binary, raw-text, UTF-8, etc. on
  every platform

I'll use your suggestions in auth-source.el's authinfo/netrc backend.

Thanks
Ted