Re: [Savannah-help-public] Re: [Groff] Mailing list munging code

[Werner LEMBERG]

> The mail munging is code specific to the FSF and should be easy to
> fix. That's in a root-owned file at lists.gnu.org and I
> unfortunately do not have root there; so we can ask address@hidden to
> do the job.
> 
> Before we do so, can you precise what was your concern about
> attachements?

I've seen in other mailing list archives that all attachments are
stripped off from the mail, being put into separate files and getting
a link to the mail.  For the groff list, this is done for binary files
only.  I think it would be an advantage if attachments are *always*
stored separately instead of being merged with the mail itself in case
the attachments are text files.

Firstly, it makes it easier to download attachments in general, and
secondly, it avoids mixing up various character encodings.  Consider a
mail written in UTF-8 but with a Chinese text attachment in Big5
encoding.  Even if the mailing archive program is sophisticated enough
to properly convert Big5 to UTF-8 (you additionally need cooperation
from the mail sender to tag the mail with the proper encoding, and
this often fails), the integrity of the attachment is lost.  As you
know, the conversion to UTF-8 is not roundtrip safe for all possible
encodings.


    Werner