Re: report on [bad] status of i18n of gnome apps - somebody should explicitly care about it

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

> >  Thank you for your intents. Yes, utf8 can be considered a requisite for i18n,
> > but it's not all that is needed. Here is a list of what is needed:
> > 
> > * charset in which messages are sent and transfer encoding in which mails are
> >   sent has to be configurable by user (sending everything in utf8 is not
> >   sufficient since there are email to pager gateways that are stupid, and
> >   pagers don't like utf8), and utf8 is not always good idea due to size of
> >   resultant representation (it's better to try to send messages in single-byte
> >   charset).
> 
> Camel does this, it chooses the best charset for each mime part.


I've seen reports of it using the "wrong" charset, or one that is not in
common use in a given environment.  Camel's list of charsets is
configurable, and based on what is available with libunicode's iconv()
conversion function (it of course will not include its own charset
converters) but nobody has told us what it should be doing, apart from a
patch we've had from Russian people to fix it up for them.  Yes maybe it
is not doing the correct thing right now, BUT the architecture is there
for it, we just need a little guidance here ...


> > 
> > * Properly setting charset name in header and for each attachment of
> >   text/plain type, properly encode body per settings
> 
> again, we do this too.


definetly.

> > 
> > * recoding the bodies/attachments and subjects of messages received to the
> >  internal representation of MUA (utf8 in case of Evo).
> 
> yup, do this.


Definetly.

> > 
> > * properly dealing with charsets of any other data Evo deals with (calendar
> >   and contacts)
> 
> can't speak for the calendar and addressbook, but I think they do.
> 
> > 
> > * when uploading mails to pilots etc message bodies and subjects have to be
> >   recoded in the form Pilots expects (I didn't check this).
> 
> we don't yet sync mail with palms, but if/when we will (probably won't
> happen until after 1.0?)


I know the calendar stuff does, so of course pilot syncing would do
this.  I'm simply boggled why it would even come up.

> > 
> > * printing messages correctly 
> 
> I can't say for certain that we do this, but I believe that we do.


I'm not sure how much postscript's limitations are a problem here
either.

I have noticed one thing, and that is that html mail is always sent
utf-8.  Now i dont know if this is an issue or utf-8 should always be
supported by browsers, etc.

 Michael