Re: [tlug] UTF-8 for single-byte character sets

[Botond Botyanszki <9915104t@example.com>]

Godwin Stewart wrote:

> The mailer I use is Sylpheed, which doesn't understand UTF-8, so I get a
> load of BS in the middle of a word whenever an accent is used.
>
> Am I right in insisting that there's no point in using UTF-8 for what can be
> perfectly well coded in a single-byte character set, or am I lagging behind
> the times? The people who post in UTF-8 insist that it's the way to go and
> that I'm stuck in the 18th century along with all the others who can't
> decode what they're sending.
>
> Your opinions?

I oppose. The people who post in UTF-8 are doing what should be done. If
everyone would do that then we wouldn't need to switch encodings to view every
email properly. On the other hand, it's annoying to get UTF-8, because we use
broken software. Sylpheed is one of them.
I often write and receive email in ISO-8859-2 and Japanese. Sylpheed just
cannot handle these two properly at the same time. When I need Japanese, I
restart sylpheed with the ja_JP locale. Not to mention that it's impossible to
write Japanese and accented letters (french as well) in the same email with
sylpheed. Doesn't that annoy you?
The problem is that sylpheed is still based on GTK1. Now that GTK2 properly
supports UTF-8, it would be the best thing on earth to have sylpheed ported to
GTK2. I've looked at the mailing list to see if a GTK2 port is planned, but
there seems to be none. Mainly because 99.9% of the people aren't affected by
the above problem, just like the lead developer. I was even thinking about
starting this fork myself, but it's not that simple (having learned enough from
porting gjiten to gnome2).
BTW, balsa got ported to gnome2 lately. A month ago when I tested, it wasn't
stable enough, but it should have improved a lot since. I'll try to switch
over.