Re: [Savannah-help-public] Re: [Groff] Mailing list munging code

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 11:13:12PM +0100, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
> > The mail munging is code specific to the FSF and should be easy to
> > fix. That's in a root-owned file at lists.gnu.org and I
> > unfortunately do not have root there; so we can ask address@hidden to
> > do the job.
> > 
> > Before we do so, can you precise what was your concern about
> > attachements?
> 
> I've seen in other mailing list archives that all attachments are
> stripped off from the mail, being put into separate files and getting
> a link to the mail.  For the groff list, this is done for binary files
> only.  I think it would be an advantage if attachments are *always*
> stored separately instead of being merged with the mail itself in case
> the attachments are text files.
> 
> Firstly, it makes it easier to download attachments in general, and
> secondly, it avoids mixing up various character encodings.  Consider a
> mail written in UTF-8 but with a Chinese text attachment in Big5
> encoding.  Even if the mailing archive program is sophisticated enough
> to properly convert Big5 to UTF-8 (you additionally need cooperation
> from the mail sender to tag the mail with the proper encoding, and
> this often fails), the integrity of the attachment is lost.  As you
> know, the conversion to UTF-8 is not roundtrip safe for all possible
> encodings.

I don't have the time to test it right now, but I do believe that's
due to the mailman is configured to strip some attachements. You can
configure this via the web interface (in the Content filtering
section).

-- 
Sylvain