From: Erland Sommarskog (sommar-usefor@algonet.se)
Date: Sat Aug 10 2002 - 15:46:14 CDT
Dirk Nimmich <nimmich@muenster.de> writes:
> I can't see any reason why a general upgrade of news servers
> because of the encoding would be necessary at all. News servers
> create groups with the encoded name, feed groups with the encoded
> name, get fed groups with the encoded name, get asked for articles
> in the groups with the encoded name, supply articles in groups with
> the encoded name, submit articles posted to a moderated group with
> an encoded name to the submission address built as usual with dots
> replaced by hyphens as the local part. They would never use the
> decoded name and never have to reencode the name to submit articles
> to a moderation address.
>
> The only software that has to be changed is client software. And
> this is only to display an encoded name decoded correctly.
Not only client software, but also whatever nifty tools that the news
admin may use. If the newsgroup is in some standard encoding, like
UTF-8, the tools works out of the box. There is a whole lot more
software in this world than news and mail software, and most of it
does not know RFC-2047, Punycode or whatever funny transport encodings
you may come up with.
> Most of the problems we are and were talking about here is because
> there are people on this list who cannot imagine that 1:1 encoding
> for transportation is not always the best solution and who mandate
> that they must be able to display articles right off the wire
> without any processing.
And it appears that some people on the list wants a transport encoding
just for the sake of it.
-- Erland Sommarskog, Stockholm, sommar@algonet.se