Re: smtpmail and ~/.authinfo

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Sun, 21 Aug 2011 22:59:03 +0300 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote: 

EZ> Since [Lars says] netrc files can have non-ASCII characters, we
EZ> should bind coding-system-for-read to raw-text when calling
EZ> auth-source-search.  I will take care of that.

Thank you.  This was set to binary by historical accident as you
guessed.

The Emacs authinfo/netrc format, incidentally, is evolved from the
original because we use the Lisp reader to consume tokens.  So for
instance we can handle quoted strings, which do not work in other
consumers of netrc-style files, notably libcurl and thus curl and Git.

Thus the Emacs format is backwards compatible but older netrc consumers
can't necessarily read our tokens, so I think it's OK that we go further
and explicitly allow Unicode characters through UTF-8.  Would it make
sense, then, to explicitly use utf-8 or auto-guess for the encoding
instead of raw-text?  There is no standard that says it should be UTF-8
but that would be the cleanest compatibility path to allow older
consumers still using ASCII to read our netrc files.

I don't know the Emacs reading/writing coding systems well so any
suggestions or ideas you have are most welcome.

Thanks
Ted