Re: Bug#3253: Pine over-encodes files (came from Bug#932)
bcwhite@verisim.com (Brian C. White) wrote on 13.06.96 in <[🔎] 31C02CA7.71AA5F81@verisim.com>:
> > i thought we all agree that this behaviour, although the
> > upstream developers call it a feature, should be considered
> > a bug?!
>
> No, not everyone. I agree with how Pine does things. If you
Not everyone, but nearly everyone who knows much about Internet mail - I'd
say close to 90%. Maybe more. (It's not the only severe design bug in
pine. Another one is the handling of mail with newsgroups: headers.)
> want to attach something then it goes through mail encoded such
> that absolutely _nothing_ can be changed. Plain-text can be
> altered. If you want to send plain text, then simply include
> the file instead. Makes perfect sense to me.
Makes no sense at all to me. If that made sense, why not encode
_everything_ as base64? What is it about attaching that necessarily makes
possible changes so disastrous that you are willing to ignore
interoperability?
IMHO, the _only_ sane way to do this is somewhat similar to the way I've
seen it with pmail.
This is how pmail does attachments:
1. Locate the file.
2. Ask user about file type (include at least choices of "text", "binary"
and "unknown").
3. Ask user about possible encodings (include at least choices of "none",
"base64" and some sort of type-dependant default; pmail also offers stuff
like uuencode and mac-specific encodings)
4.Attach with content-type: made from 2 and content-encoding: made from 3.
Simply _assuming_ answers to 2 and 3 is just plain stupid. Note that I
would consider it just as stupid to attach everything as text/plain with
no encoding at all.
MfG Kai
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