[Mailman-i18n] Pipermail and non-English lists

[Martin v.Löwis]

barry@python.org (Barry A. Warsaw) writes:

>     TK> Japanese need this because there are three charsets widely
>     TK> used.
> 
> Ouch.  This sounds like something we probably need to do if Japanese
> archives are going to come out right, but it also sounds like a fair
> bit of work.

I'm not so sure this is necessary. For forwarding the messages, header
and footer would just become different parts right now. Correct?
That may not be perfect, but I think it will work.

> Why does it need to be part of the global pipeline?  I'd imagine its
> only necessary where email messages might get displayed in http, so
> that'd mean Pipermail and the admindb.

Even for the archives, I'm not so sure it is needed. If the message is
in a different encoding than the list's preferred encoding, you now
recode the message to the list's encoding. For the Japanese encodings,
this should work mostly without problems.

> Most languages aren't going to need alternative charsets, right?  

Increasingly wrong. We Germans had been using latin-1 exclusively for
some time, but now we also find cp1252, iso-8859-15 (latin-9), and
utf-8 being used.

> I'm guessing Japanese and perhaps other Asian languages (but I don't
> know for sure).  What would be the value of altcharsets for
> Japanese?

iso-2022-jp, eucJP, shift_jis, cp932, with various aliases
(essentially, the encodings supported by JapaneseCodecs).

Regards,
Martin