Re: Use MIME (Was: encoding of /etc/passwd)

[Markus Kuhn <mgk25@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Alexander Voropay wrote:
> Markus Kuhn <mgk25@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> >Global files such as /etc/*, /usr/include/*, etc. obviously *must* remain
> >in a locale invariant encoding. This is today ISO 646 IRV (US-ASCII).
> >Hopefully it will one day become UTF-8. ISO 8859-1 has no place in
> >/etc/passwd and similar files and should be strongly discouraged there.
>
>
>  It is possible to encode strings in global files into *locale-independent* format
> as MIME RFC-2047, like MIME-encoded headers in ALL modern e-mail
> (with any Charsets, even UTF-8  ;). So, MUA could take this strings as-is.
>
> To: =?utf-8?B?0LXRg9GL0LU=?=

Changing all programs that read global files to handle MIME base 64, which
is neither human readable nor technically justifyable here (as there is no
email transparency requirement) is *far* more work and breaks *far* more
things than changing everything to UTF-8. MIME clearly is no solution
here. Stick with ASCII for the moment, upgrade to UTF-8 when the time
comes.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>

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