[Pan-users] The "no-break-space" problem, aka "blank" posts, that shouldn't be

[Duncan]

Does anybody else get frustrated with "blank" posts, that shouldn't be?

There's probably a bug open on this, tho I've not looked.  It seems pan 
(or the gtk+ widget it uses to display posts, or the mimelib it uses to 
decode them) doesn't cope properly with the Latin-1 (aka 
charset="iso-8859-1) and Unicode no-break-space character, hex A0, 
presented in MIME/quoted-printable posts in "raw" form using the = A 0 
escape sequence (three chars, spaced out here, to avoid triggering the 
problem with this post, but normally together).

When pan encounters this character, it simply fails to display the entire 
post, such that it looks blank. (If you have headers toggled on and it's 
in the main body, you do see the headers.  I don't know what it would do 
with posts with multiple text parts, which it usually displays, if only 
one had this char, whether it'd display all but that one, or none of 
them.)

I'm seeing this frustratingly frequently on gmane's list2news groups in 
particular.  FWIW, looking at the headers of the one I have in front of 
me ATM, the original client was:

X-Mailer: YahooMailRC/240.3 YahooMailWebService/0.8.100.260964

Of course, that's converted by gmane.  However, the post appears to be 
adhering to standards (quoted-printable using the appropriate = escape, 
and correct iso-8859-1 according to the table at wikipedia under that 
standard), so it's not a rogue client or bad conversion.

I don't know if there are other characters that cause pan to "blank", or 
not, but this one's sufficiently common, at least in the groups I browse, 
that it needs taken care of, preferably before the next release.

It seems to me that, even if it's a bug in the display widget, as I 
suspect is quite possible, it should be /relatively/ easy to code around 
it, by replacing that character, for display only, with a standard space 
char, ASCII hex 20.

KHaley?  Anyone else with the coding skills necessary?  Would any of you 
like to take a look?

Here are some of the headers (missing ones denoted with a blank line) of 
the post with the issue that I'm looking at ATM.  It's available on 
nntp://news.gmane.org , for anyone who wishes to take a look at it.  Note 
that there's a URL to the web interface as the bottom header.  Of course, 
that's not going to provide the raw post as necessary to debug the issue, 
but it's what I'm using ATM to actually read the message.  Replying is 
unfortunately a different matter, as tho I can of course select/copy and 
paste, I then have to go thru and manually add the quote indicators, 
which can be a pain.  So I usually just don't bother, and let someone 
else have at the post.

Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail
From: Rajat Rajput <address@hidden>
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.kde.linux
Subject: kwin - X - opengl
Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 19:07:59 +0530 (IST)
Lines: 40

Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 3 Dec 2009 13:42:59 +0000 (UTC)

X-Mailer: YahooMailRC/240.3 YahooMailWebService/0.8.100.260964
X-BeenThere: address@hidden
X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.9

Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.comp.kde.linux:25881
Archived-At: <http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.kde.linux/25881>


FWIW, the permalink page has a link in the left column to the nntp:// 
protocol newsgroup.  I run kde and was looking at the page in konqueror, 
but don't have knode installed as I use pan, so I expected an error 
telling me it didn't understand the protocol when I clicked.  I was 
pleasantly surprised to see... apparently there's an nntp kioslave, and 
the newsgroup opened in /dolphin/ of all things, as a virtual folder, 
with every message appearing as a file, all nearly 26 thousand of them 
gmane has archived for that list!  Fortunately it didn't appear to 
download all the messages, perhaps just the overviews, or maybe even just 
the message sequence (xref) numbers, which is what it displays as the 
"filenames".  Simple clicking on a "file" did produce the expected error, 
but I was able to right-click and select open with kwrite, which it did.

So I just discovered something new about kde (4.3.3 installed) that I 
didn't know before -- it has an nntp kioslave, and can open newsgroups in 
dolphin, and messages using my text-editor of choice, kwrite being what 
was setupt! =:^)  FWIW2, I discovered some time ago, more or less equally 
accidentally, that the text-based lynx browser has nntp:// capacities as 
well.  That can be very handy when X won't start and you find the answer 
to fix it in a newspost! =:^)  

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman