Re: [PATCH] git-gui: Added support for OS X right click

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Aug 4, 2007, 16:37 UTC
Message-ID: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0708040928350.5037@woody.linux-foundation.org>
In-Reply-To: <20070804071131.GA6557@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Sat, 4 Aug 2007, Jeff King wrote:

Show 6 quoted lines

>
> On Sat, Aug 04, 2007 at 02:55:16AM -0400, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:
> 
> > V??in?? J??rvel?? <v@pp.inet.fi> wrote:
> 
> Your mailer claims this message is in us-ascii, but I think it isn't...

Actually, the email claims it was iso-latin1, at least here. Which the *body* of the email apparently really was.

However (and this is a pretty common thing), the *headers* are unspecified, and a lot of email clients seem to think that if that happens, they default to US-ASCII and think that those iso-latin1 characters are crud.

Which is a damn shame. "alpine" does this, and it irritates me no end. I see emails where I can read the body fine, but it shows '????' for subject lines and authors even though it's the exact same character set.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Dammit, if the thing says

	Content-type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

(which it did), then yes, by some idiotic reading of the RFC's that probably only affects the body of the email. But those headers (and the "From:" line in particular) were *also* in ISO-8859-1, and email clients should default to using the same character set unless something else is said.

Btw, I suspect git "mailsplit" gets this wrong too. I rant and rave, but in the end, I solved it by just having the code guess sanely (commit b59d398beab604e577846ef8393735478c1ca3c2 makes things come out right in practice, regardless) instead of trying to do something "technically correct".

			Linus