MIME Distribution: headers

[Russ Allbery]

Julien ÉLIE <julien at trigofacile.com> writes:

>> No, I don't think so, at least unless we decide to do so with all
>> configuration files.  The easy approach, and the reasonable one for now, I
>> think, is to require that people who put non-ASCII distributions in
>> newsfeeds use UTF-8.  (This is probably also worth a comment.)  Then the
>> existing code, which does byte string comparisons, should just work.
>
> But if I put in newsfeeds:
>
>    news.server.org/cérémonie
>
> how can it work when I send:
>
>    Distribution: =?iso-8859-15?Q?c=E9r=E9monie?=
>
> Headers are usually MIME-encoded in articles.

Distribution can't be encoded like that.  RFC 2047 encoding is only
supported where explicitly stated that it is.  USEFOR doesn't permit RFC
2047 encoding in Distribution; hence, it's not allowed, and such a
Distribution would be taken as that literal string, not as an encoded
UTF-8 string.

It's therefore somewhat unimportant how we handle Distribution at the
moment given that there's no standards-compliant way of using a non-ASCII
Distribution.

I don't know what will happen down the road.  Certainly, some people in
the Usenet community feel that for Usenet-only headers like Distribution,
we should say that literal UTF-8 can be used.  RFC 2047 provides better
compatibility with e-mail, however.  But we can cross that bridge when we
come to it (and at that point we'll probably need an RFC 2047 decoder in
INN for other reasons as well).

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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