Re: smtpmail and ~/.authinfo

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:07:42 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote: 

SJT> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen writes:
>> On the other hand, if auth-source prompts for a password, and you type
>> in something non-ASCII, the result will probably be something utf8-ey, I
>> think?

SJT> No.  1.3 billion Chinese are very likely to use GB2312, not to mention
SJT> 130 million Japanese who use Shift JIS.  These are not UTF-8-ey in
SJT> several ways, and Shift JIS even abuses octets in the ASCII range for
SJT> use in multibyte characters.

UTF-8 is an encoding; you're talking about charsets.  Can you explain
more precisely what you mean by "not UTF-8-ey in several ways"?

SJT> If you have *no* password and the user asks to store one, yes, use
SJT> UTF-8, and warn the user that Emacs has chosen to use the standard
SJT> Unicode encoding "UTF-8", but other applications (especially on
SJT> Windows) may choose something else.  In which case the user will be
SJT> unable to log in from those applications.

Would it be enough to let the user override that coding system choice
through a defcustom?  For all the use cases I have seen, UTF-8 is
enough, so I'd rather use it by default.

SJT> If you already have a password, it should be read verbatim (binary, or
SJT> raw-text should do given the line-oriented nature of these
SJT> configuration files) and treated as a binary blob.

That's not helpful when you need to encode it for IMAP, for instance.
You have to know the actual characters that make up the binary blob.

Ted