Re: FreeBSD 7.0 on DVD

Oliver Fromme wrote:
> I think the problem is that your mail uses the charset
> "KOI8-R", and Julian's MUA doesn't know how to handle
> that.

EXMH 2.7.2 01.07.2005 (from 6.2-RELEASE) displays KOI8-R OK within
itself, (Exmh is 2.7.2_1 in -current/ports).
When clicking to reply & an xterm springs up running external
selectable editor vi, then if base64, it's just a load of hex in
vi.  If the KOI8-R is raw as in Dimitry's 2nd posting, my vi in
xterm (with US default fonts) EXMH works OK, though his Russian sig
line looks unintelligib;e, but probably would comes out unaltered
on a russian xterm.

I guess an ideal MUA when clicking Reply might say eg 
   "Which Enclosure[s] ? to edit"  & then sense base 64, decode it,
   create an xterm(s) with matching font set(s), & start a [16 bit
   char?] editor (maybe vi or eg cxterm if Chinese etc, & on
   completion reverse all above for potentialy each enclosure ?  A
   scarey/ambitious level of functionality to aspire to :-)


> Maybe you should configure your mailer to send
> plain ASCII when mailing to international (English-
> sepaking) lists?

Would help, might be a nuisance for Dimitry & other switching per
mail ?  Dimitry's 2nd koi8-r worked, (without MIME enclosure) no
problem.  Just the base64 encoded MIME enclosure seemed to be the
problem.  Might be easier/ better to leave that off ?


> On the other hand, my client doesn't send plain ASCII
> either, but ISO8859-1 (or -15, depending on the type of
> terminal I'm sitting at).  I'm not aware of any problems
> caused by that.
> 
> In fact KOI8-R is a superset of ASCII (just like the
> ISO8859-* and Windows-1252 character sets).  So such
> messages can be displayed as-is if they don't contain
> characters beyond 7bit ASCII.  I think metamail is
> clever enough to just do that.  At least it does that
> for me; I had no problems displaying Bachilo Dmitry's
> message, except for a few characters (cyrillic, I guess)
> in the attribution line that were converted to question
> marks.  Not a big deal.
> 
> I'm afraid I'm not familiar with EXMH, so I don't know
> if this is helpful information.  Does EXMH call metamail
> for MIME-formatted messages, or does it try handle them
> itself?

Good question.  EXMH does use metamail at least for some things
EXMH uses repl ( from ports/mail/nmh ) & ~/mail/replcomps &
filter etc.  EXMH supports both an internal editor & external
eg vi or whatever, Till now I've always used external vi.


> BTW, I'm surprised that it simply seems to display the
> raw base64 data.  If it doesn't know how to handle the
> charset, it should either display the decoded data as-is,
> or don't display it at all and give an error message.
> I'm sure there's something that needs to be configured.

Yes, Thanks, got me thinking :-)
I'd better look at base64 handling & ~/mail/ filter,replcomps,forwcomps.

-- 
Julian Stacey.  BSD Unix Linux Net Consultant, Munich.  http://berklix.com