[Mailman-i18n] Polish language template files

[Mark Sapiro]

On 01/18/2017 08:02 PM, Mark Dale wrote:
> 
> Thank you Mark. This has been an education.
> 
> Although I may be headed in the opposite direction of what you have been
> saying, my thinking is that Debian is seemingly geared for UTF-8, so
> with that in mind I've loaded the language templates and message files
> (UTF-8) from the latest Debian Mailman package (extracted from the .deb
> file) to the server.


That is the correct thing to do in your case.


> Things now appear to be okay, with the webpages, emails, message
> archives - now displaying correctly for all the languages - including
> Greek and Japanese.
> 
> I read the threads that you pointed me too, in particular the one
> regarding the qrunner. My understanding from reading it is that the
> issue of bad unicode characters causing problems doesn't apply after
> version 2.1.21 due to the patch you committed. Did I get that right?


The patch that I committed to "fix"
<https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/1462755> only addresses one
thing. That one thing is shunted messages due to the list's description
attribute being encoded in a character set incompatible with utf-8. It
doesn't fix the fact that the list's description attribute is now
incorrectly encoded, it just ignores it, so when making an email address
of the form

list description <list at example.com>

for use in the List-Id: header and perhaps in a Reply-To: header if
reply goes to the list or a Cc: header for fully personalized lists, the
description is just not included.

The issues caused by recoding all the templates and messages to utf-8
and changing Mailman's character set to utf-8 are that any strings in
existing list attributes that are encoded in a prior, utf-8 incompatible
character set will at best be garbled and at worst throw exceptions
causing shunted messages.

This is fixed by just re-entering the list attributes via config_list or
the web UI, but this can be a big job of there are many such strings in
multiple lists. There is a script at
<https://www.msapiro.net/scripts/recode_list> (mirrored at
<https://fog.ccsf.edu/~msapiro/scripts/recode_list> that can do this
programmatically. The script will guess at what needs to be recoded and
can pretty much guarantee that after use, no UnicodeError exceptions
will be thrown, but it doesn't guarantee that the recoded strings are
correct.

Just read the beginning of the script or install it and run it with the
--help option for usage.


> I've now downloaded the most recent Debian Mailman package (with the
> UTF-8), extracted all the language template directories and loaded them
> to the server (replacing all the ones that were there already).
> 
> All the languages I've listed above that I was having trouble with are
> now all good (including Greek) - for both the web pages and the emails.


Good, but the real question is why when your Mailman package with
Debian's universal utf-8 patch was installed were the message catalogs
and templates not also replaced with the utf-8 encoded versions.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan