[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: UTF-8 newsgroup name feedback




Julien ÉLIE wrote:

Hi all,

For they who are interested, I have just sent a newgroup
control article for local.test.υτφ8 so that you could
retrieve it and eventually process it (changing "local"
to whatever you want):

   <news:newgroup-local-test-utf8-1264843277@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>


Note for inn-workers
--------------------
I confirm it works fine with INN provided that we remove
the check for [^a-z0-9+_\-] in a newsgroup name (enforced
by controlchan).  I suggest that we remove it in INN 2.5.2.
We can reintegrate a better check with allowed UTF-8 values
in future versions of INN.


Note for USEFOR
---------------
In case someone wants to see what the result is, you can use
news.trigofacile.com on port 119.
The trigofacile.test.υτφ8 newsgroup has been created in UTF-8.
It is readable by everyone.

If you want to post, authenticate with user "test" and password
"test".

The group properly shows up in LIST ACTIVE and LIST NEWSGROUPS.


Unfortunately, Windows Mail is unable to post to it...  It says
the group does not exist and refuses to send my post.
Well, let's crosspost then to trigofacile.test.υτφ8 and trigofacile.test.

And what does Windows Mail send to the server?

Newsgroups: =?UTF-8?Q?trigofacile.test.=CF=85=CF=84=CF=868=2Ctrigofacil?=\r\n
\t=?UTF-8?Q?e.test?=\r\n
Followup-To: =?UTF-8?Q?trigofacile.test.=CF=85=CF=84=CF=868?=\r\n

Gosh, that's not a success at all for Windows Mail :-/
Thanks for those tests!

It seems that you have demonstrated the existence of a large body of deployed software (including, but not limited to, Windows Mail and unmodified INN) that will not work with UTF-8 newsgroup names.

That leads me to suggest that if we want to have UTF-8 newsgroup names, perhaps we need to have a capability signallling mechanism and some kind of block/downgrade mechanism (one could imagine simply not distributing or admitting the existence of UTF-8 newsgroups to anyone who does not signal support, or one could imagine more complex schemes.

                         Harald