Re: [Nmh-workers] Understanding nmh (aka. What's the goal) [ really non-ASCII message bodies ]

[Peter Maydell]

chad wrote:
>On Dec 7, 2010, at 12:48 PM, Ken Hornstein wrote:
>> You know .... I'm all for backwards compatibility and everything, but
>> I'm wondering ... did the previous behavior actually make sense?  Can
>> people argue that it was desirable or correct?  Or was the previous
>> behavior actually wrong, and this is really fixing a long-standing
>> bug?  
>
>It was a bug.  The only suggesting that it wasn't a bug is instead saying 
>that it was `illegal' (which it wasn't... it just usually was a bad idea).

I agree; we should just change the behaviour here. (In particular
the previous behaviour would have differed in how it handled the
body depending on whether there was an attachment or not, which
suggests to me that it's just not a case anybody has cared about
before now.)

(In fact I think we should go ahead and change the behaviour for
not-plain-ASCII bodies even if the user didn't pass the -attach
switch, but I'm guessing I might get argued down on that.)

I do think the "is the body not plain ASCII?" check is not quite right.
I think that the presence of special characters (most notably ESC)
ought to also MIMEification. Otherwise we will not do the right thing
for Japanese character sets like shift-JIS. (Yes, I do care about this,
it's not just idle nitpickery.) I would suggest
 if (*p != '\t' && (*p >= 127 || *p < 32) {
    non_ascii = 1;

ie encode unless it's in the printable ascii range or space or tab.

-- PMM