[alpine] multipart quoting of big5 [Was: making posts unreadable...]

On 2007-09-25, Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> wrote:
> In <slrnffgke2.7ko.pjr@pjr.gotdns.org>, Peter J Ross wrote:
>
>> Am I the only one who thinks that (a) pine is broken and (b) some
>> comp.mail.pine posters are in danger of disappearing up their own
>> arses?
>
> The rational for (al)pine using multipart/mixed was explained in the
> material Eduardo posted. Do you have an argument with that rationale?
> If so, don't just bitch about it among yourselves, tell it to the pine
> people.

The reason is simply not true. It makes no sense to do what pine does,
to create "multipart" posts for articles with 8 bit characters and not
to do so for us-ascii. At least with the argument he said, why paine
does this.

The only reason why I could imagine to do this IMHO is that they did
implement a different behavior when talking to mailservers which are 8
bit aware or not.

The way pine is encoding mails it will never have a different
content-type in the header except from:

| Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii

And this has nothing to do with protecting Emails/News from ads. This
has to do with the old times when there where mailservers not accepting
8bit mails.

>> Pine is sending "multipart/mixed" articles, and they think that's
>> *good*.
>
> Apparently slrn only implements MIME standards in a half-assed way, and
> they think that that is good. Furthermore those users want the rest of
> the world to adjust slrn's non-standard implementation.

I agree, that at least the multipart handling of slrn is not so good. I
wrote a patch for slrn, that can ease the pain when reading pine
articels. Those guys here using my patch (included in pl2.1) should be
able to see the difference when adding

| set minimal_multipart 0

to the slrnrc.

But the thing is, usenet is a text only medium, there is no need for
multipart/mixed, except for binary groups. slrn focussed on the
important features of a newsreader, like threading, scoring etc.

Since when pine was able to to threading?

Cheers,

Thomas

--
slrn charset patches: http://www.foory.de/thw/slrn/

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Thomas Wiegner wrote:

On 2007-09-24, Eduardo Chappa <chappa@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
>
> That makes absolute sense for mail. (Al)pine's default before is
> the correct choice for mail. The difficulty it seems is that there
> are a lot of people using newsreaders that don't do MIME properly.
>
> So I guess what I would want is a
>
> "Downgrade-multipart-to-single-part-when-posting-to-news"
>
> which seems like a lot to ask.
>
> But consider that there could be a "free" news server out there that
> is appending stuff (e.g. ads) to free posts and appends these
> messages without regards to the charset of the message. Then wrapping
> makes sense.

And why are only posts with non-ascii characters mangled to pseudo
multipart postings? The above argument is also valid for pure us-ascii
postings.

How? If a post contains only us-ascii, then that message is labeled as
such, and adding ascii to it won't do anything.

Now if you have a text encoded, and add ascii, then things get mangled,
and that's where the problem comes from.

I've never seen newsservers adding ads to postings. I've seen that on
mailing lists.

I said I don't know if it makes sense to do this for news. I said that
wrapping could be necessary in a situation like this. I do not know of any
news server that does what I told you, but I don't discard that behavior.
To me the behavior makes sense. It might be undesirable, but it's a
reality and improving slrn will make the "problem" go away.

--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/

Thomas Wiegner wrote:
> On 2007-09-24, Eduardo Chappa <chappa@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>> On Mon, 24 Sep 2007, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote:
>>
>> That makes absolute sense for mail. (Al)pine's default before is the
>> correct choice for mail. The difficulty it seems is that there are a
>> lot of people using newsreaders that don't do MIME properly.
>>
>> So I guess what I would want is a
>>
>> "Downgrade-multipart-to-single-part-when-posting-to-news"
>>
>> which seems like a lot to ask.
>>
>> But consider that there could be a "free" news server out there that is
>> appending stuff (e.g. ads) to free posts and appends these messages
>> without regards to the charset of the message. Then wrapping makes sense.
>
> And why are only posts with non-ascii characters mangled to pseudo
> multipart postings? The above argument is also valid for pure us-ascii
> postings.
>
> I've never seen newsservers adding ads to postings. I've seen that on
> mailing lists.

It's common, Thomas. I see it all the time -- three- or four-line
server ad sigs below what the poster has posted.


--
Blinky RLU 297263
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project moved to this site August 28th:
http://improve-usenet.org

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Thomas Wiegner wrote:

But the thing is, usenet is a text only medium, there is no need for
multipart/mixed, except for binary groups.

Aha!, that's your point. No wonder Mark is predicting the end of usenet. A
text only medium in this age? I hope Mark is starts advocating for a new
USENET++ based on IMAP . Then this argument wouldn't even make sense.

You see, I've never converted anyone to Pine, because despite Pine being a
wonderful program does not have a GUI. It's time to move to a new usenet,
one that follows the trends of the time.

slrn focussed on the important features of a newsreader, like
threading, scoring etc.

Since when pine was able to to threading?

I understand, but USENET is not about threading or scoring. Threading and
scoring exists because users want to be able to read news more
conveniently, and programs like Pine support such features. Similarly,
MIME exists so that users can exchange information. Some people are being
hurt for the lack of a feature of a program and blame the people that
point that out to them for their grief. I am sure that slrn must be a very
good program. It just needs an update to deal with some already old
technology.

--
Eduardo
http://staff.washington.edu/chappa/pine/

On 2007-09-25, Eduardo Chappa <chappa@u.washington.edu> wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Thomas Wiegner wrote:

> And why are only posts with non-ascii characters mangled to pseudo
> multipart postings? The above argument is also valid for pure us-ascii
> postings.
>
> How? If a post contains only us-ascii, then that message is labeled as
> such, and adding ascii to it won't do anything.

And what's know the difference if the post contains iso-8859-1 or
utf-8, then that message would be labeled as such, and adding ascii to
it won't do anything.

You see my point?

> Now if you have a text encoded, and add ascii, then things get mangled,
> and that's where the problem comes from.

No it does not, adding ascii won't do anything, because the plain ascii
characters are encoded in every encoding the same.

> I've never seen newsservers adding ads to postings. I've seen that on
> mailing lists.
>
> I said I don't know if it makes sense to do this for news. I said that
> wrapping could be necessary in a situation like this. I do not know of any
> news server that does what I told you, but I don't discard that behavior.
> To me the behavior makes sense.

Wrapping might make sense to protect messages, but it should not be the
default behaviour.

It was already the default behavior, when I used it 15 years back at the
university and at this time adding ads to postings or emails was
definitely *not* the problem.

This wrapping was done because of not 8 bit aware mailservers and it
seems to me the programmers did not want to implement the smtp dialog in
a way to figure out whether the mailserver was 8 bit capable or not.

> It might be undesirable, but it's a reality and improving slrn will
> make the "problem" go away.

Yes, in this point you are right, that's the reason, why I changed this
in slrn. With my patches slrn displays multipart mangled postings how
they should look.

Thomas

--
multipart support for slrn: http://www.foory.de/thw/slrn/

Eduardo Chappa wrote:
> On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Thomas Wiegner wrote:
>
> But the thing is, usenet is a text only medium, there is no need for
> multipart/mixed, except for binary groups.
>
> Aha!, that's your point. No wonder Mark is predicting the end of
> usenet. A text only medium in this age? I hope Mark is starts
> advocating for a new USENET++ based on IMAP . Then this argument
> wouldn't even make sense.
>
> You see, I've never converted anyone to Pine, because despite Pine
> being a wonderful program does not have a GUI. It's time to move to a
> new usenet, one that follows the trends of the time.

So the trend being to Google Groups and other klunky web gateways for
the incompetent, you're sending them there where they may not even know
they're *using* Usenet? No, I'm not suggesting that that's a good idea;
please see my sig for an indication of my stance on that.



--
Blinky RLU 297263
Killing all posts from Google Groups
The Usenet Improvement Project moved to this site August 28th:
http://improve-usenet.org

Hi there


On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Peter J Ross wrote:

> Let me put it this way:
>
> "Content-Type: multipart/mixed" has no place in Usenet outside
> alt.binaries, with the sole exception of PGP/MIME signatures, and even
> they're generally disliked and are likely to result in the poster
> being widely killfiled.
>
> Please encourage the pine developers to fix the bug in their software
> that prevents pine users from sending anything other than US-ASCII
> without perpetrating an approximate equivalent to text/html.

So, if I put something like '£ € ¥ ⅟₁₆' here, this post becomes
multipart?
Or did I miss something?


Regards,
Rob
--
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Rob van der Putten, rob@sput.nl |
| http://www.sput.nl/spam/spam-policy.html |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------+

Hi there


Rob van der Putten wrote:

> So, if I put something like '£ € ¥ ⅟₁₆' here, this post becomes multipart?
> Or did I miss something?

Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT
Message-ID: <alpine.DEB.0.9999.0709251314180.13214@sput.int.sp ut.nl>


Regards,
Rob
--
Terry Gilliam's Brazil is here and now

In <slrnffhe74.2b3.wiegner@dost.mchm.siemens.de>, Thomas Wiegner wrote:

> Jeffrey Goldberg <nobody@goldmark.org> wrote:

>> The rational for (al)pine using multipart/mixed was explained in the
>> material Eduardo posted.

> The reason is simply not true. It makes no sense to do what pine does,
> to create "multipart" posts for articles with 8 bit characters and not
> to do so for us-ascii. At least with the argument he said, why paine
> does this.

I will leave this for others to discuss. My opinions on this are far from
solid. I assume that the pine people put that in to solve some real
problem. But what you say also makes sense.

> I agree, that at least the multipart handling of slrn is not so good. I
> wrote a patch for slrn, that can ease the pain when reading pine
> articels. Those guys here using my patch (included in pl2.1) should be
> able to see the difference when adding
>
> | set minimal_multipart 0

That is good news. I know nothing about the slrn development process, but
I hope that your patch becomes "official" and it seems that the setting
it introduces ought to be the default.

> But the thing is, usenet is a text only medium, there is no need for
> multipart/mixed, except for binary groups.

As you can imagine, Pine users also agree that usenet should be text only.
But the way for slrn to support that while still complying with MIME
standards is not to simply barf at multipart/mixed, but to reject parts
which are something other than text/plain (or arguably text/enriched).

The non-patched behavior of slrn is to fail to process properly standards
compliant text/plain parts. There are better ways to be text only.

> slrn focussed on the important features of a newsreader, like threading,
> scoring etc.

I don't want to get into slrn vs pine as a newsreader. If I didn't want
access to my IMAP folders when reading news, I wouldn't be using (al)pine
for news.

> Since when pine was able to to threading?

Someone can dig through revision history, but I think that it's been at
least eight years.

-j

--
Jeffrey Goldberg http://www.goldmark.org/jeff/
I rarely read top-posted, over-quoting or HTML postings.
http://improve-usenet.org/

On Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:04:28 -0700, Eduardo Chappa wrote:

> On Tue, 25 Sep 2007, Thomas Wiegner wrote:
>
> But the thing is, usenet is a text only medium, there is no need for
> multipart/mixed, except for binary groups.

Please use a standard quote marker.

--
Ted S.
fedya at bestweb dot net