Developers of Sympa

[David Verdin <address@concealed>]

Dear all,

I spent some time reading all this thread. Here are a few remarks:

As Soji mentioned, all internal Sympa data are UTF-8 encoded since 2007. 
Soji did this conversion. So if the only data we handled were Sympa 
data, using utf8:all would be perfect.

Most encoding-related problems come from the mails and Soji deals with 
this problem since 10 years in Sympa, so I guess he knows the problem 
pretty well. Not only can't we assume that most data will be UTF-8, we 
can be sure of the contrary: most data will not be UTF-8. And in some 
cases, they will be horribly twisted data such as in Soji's examples. 
Anyone dealing with large mailing list servers can tell the horrors we 
can meet on a daily basis.

Consequently, we can assume that any file we open which is not 
mail-related will be UTF-8. The rest will not. Enforcing the usage of 
utf8:all everywhere in the code seems therefore hazardous.

Indeed, sending a mail using Email::sender is straightforward when you 
have a well-controlled application sending its own messages. But that's 
not what Sympa does.

About PEP, I have no strict opinion. However, when manipulating mails, 
we already use external libraries. I don't see a clear functional 
superiority of Email::* modules compared to the MIME::* modules we use 
already.

I have also other concerns about using modules to send mails: for now, 
when Sympa distributes a message, it transmits the message source to the 
sendmail command through a pipe; The benefit is that Sympa does not have 
to handle anything related to the SMTP protocol. I don't know how the 
PEP modules handle it. It's also difficult to know how a listmaster 
could tweak the sendmail command options as Sympa does right now using 
the sendmail_args parameter 
(https://www.sympa.org/manual/conf-parameters/part2#sendmail_args).

Regards,

David


On 27/02/2018 10:12, Marc Chantreux wrote:
> hello people,
>
> i really thing Sympatic should use
>
>      use utf8:all;
>
> or at least
>
>      use utf8;
>      use open qw< :encoding(UTF-8) :std >;
>
> what is your opinion about it ?
>
> regards,
> marc

--
"Mieux vaut viser la perfection et la rater que viser la médiocrité et 
l'atteindre."
- Francis Blanche

Attachment: smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature