MIME Distribution: headers

[Julien ÉLIE]

Hi,

The Distribution: header is not necessarily in US-ASCII characters.

Though USEFOR states:

   dist-name       =  ALPHA / DIGIT
                      *( ALPHA / DIGIT / "+" / "-" / "_" )

RFC 3977 states:

   distribution = token
   token = 1*P-CHAR
   P-CHAR     = A-CHAR / UTF8-non-ascii


As we already did in Makefile.global:

   ##      If you modify these two strings, you must encode them in UTF-8
   ##      (using only US-ASCII characters is consequently also fine) and
   ##      keep their length reasonable; otherwise, your news server will not
   ##      be complying with the NNTP protocol.

   VERSION  = 2.5.0
   VERSION_EXTRA = prerelease

we probably should do the same with the distrib.pats file and its man page.


However, my concern is with newsfeeds.  It handles distributions.  Does it
mean we have to do some sort of MIME decoding in order to implement RFC 3977?





Another question:  with the active.times file, I do not know what is the
best we can do in order to write the newsgroup creator's name in UTF-8...
I think that only ctlinnd matters for that (mod-active and controlchan
write "usenet" or something like that -- I have not checked).
Is putting a warning in the man page of ctlinnd enough?
The encoding depends on the one of the shell used!


Dealing with encodings is not easy at all!

-- 
Julien ÉLIE

« Ta remise sur pied lui a fait perdre la tête ! » (Astérix)