Re: Rss produced by git is not valid xml?

From: Junio C Hamano <junkio@cox.net>
Date: Nov 19, 2005, 10:31 UTC
Message-ID: <7v7jb57wud.fsf@assigned-by-dhcp.cox.net>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511181653191.13959@g5.osdl.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

> Although right now "-u" doesn't actually _force_ a conversion: if you have 
> an email with 8-bit characters and no character set mentioned, it will 
> silently just do nothing, and the end result won't be valid UTF-8 after 
> all.

... unless it was already utf8, that is. I have received a couple of patches with charset=utf-8; I think cte of them were qp, which was a bit unpleasant.

> If we want utf-8, we should probably force it, and default to the latin1 
> translation (with some way to specify alternatives).

Well, some people on the list seem to think UTF-8 is the one and only right encoding, so for them if the message does not identify what it is in, assuming UTF-8 and not doing any conversion is probably the right thing ;-).

This suggests a few flags (config items) to mailinfo:

    (1) if we pass thru the input intact or not (1 bit);

    (2) what charset to assume if the mail does not identify
        itself (default to latin1; specify "barf" to mean abort
        processing if a message with 8-bit character does not
        identify itself);

    (3) what we do when the mail does not transliterate
        correctly (1 bit -- fail, or remove offending bytes and
        pretend things are peachy -- defaulting on the stricter
        side);