bug#35383: 27.0.50; Complete process of decoding Gnus group names

[Andy Moreton]

On Mon 22 Apr 2019, Eric Abrahamsen wrote:

> This is part two and the completion of bug#33653, which changed Gnus's
> obarrays into hash tables, and group names from symbols to (encoded)
> strings. The commits in the recently-pushed "scratch/gnus-decoded"
> branch change group names to decoded strings.
>
> Bug 33653 was a mess for a few reasons: I partitioned the changes
> poorly, didn't call for testers, and it turned out that I was locally
> testing a mismash of that change plus a couple changes included in this
> branch, which hid some bugs.
>
> This time around I'll keep it cleaner: I'll locally test only this
> change in isolation, I'm writing a semi-interactive test suite for Gnus,
> and in a few weeks I'll rope in three or four users to road-test the
> changes. The upside is that, once these changes are stabilized and put
> in, it will eliminate a whole class of potential bugs.
>
> In the meantime I'm hanging this here as a placeholder. If any brave
> soul does decide to give it a test-run in the meantime, back up your
> .newsrc.eld file first!

There don;t seem to bnbe any problems with the .nersrc.eld, as I have
used the same file in emacs-26, master and scratch/gnus-decoded branches
without obvious problems.

There is a problem in the server buffer in the scratch/gnus-decoded buffer
with group names. In my setup:
1) Start gnus, and open the server buffer
2) Select the feedbase server. This is configured as:

  (gnus-secondary-select-methods
   '((nntp "feedbase"
           (nntp-open-connection-function nntp-open-tls-stream)
           (nntp-port-number 563)
           (nntp-address "feedbase.org"))
     ...

3) Note that some group names are not decoded correctly in the server
buffer. The group names are decoded properly in the article buffer.

For example, (showing only names with problems):

server buffer (master branch):

K    140: feedbase.blog.københavnsskiklub
K    208: feedbase.news.brk.høringer
K   2017: feedbase.news.dr.hovedstadsområdet


server buffer (scratch/gnus-decoded branch):

K    140: feedbase.blog.k\303\270benhavnsskiklub
K    208: feedbase.news.brk.h\303\270ringer
K   2017: feedbase.news.dr.hovedstadsomr\303\245det

The raw bytes (shown as escapes above) match the UTF-8 for the expected
characters, so the decoding is not quite right.

    AndyM