Re: Character display problem in mumi and my mail client

[Ricardo Wurmus <rekado@elephly.net>]

Hi Jack,

thanks for the report.

> It appears that mumi (or at least the instance of it running on
> issues.guix.gnu.org) has problems displaying some non-ASCII
> characters. I noticed it with '’'. Compare
>
> https://issues.guix.gnu.org/issue/36207
>
> with
>
> https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=36207

The problem here is that the Debbugs SOAP service (which we use in
guile-debbugs and thus mumi) serves up a base64-encoded blob for the
email body without any information about encodings, so we just try UTF-8
and fall back to ISO 8859-1 if there’s an error.  If we could operate on
the actual email that would be different.

Unfortunately, the SOAP service does not provide access to the actual
emails.  That’s only available through … the official Debbugs web
interface.

I’m currently in the process of moving away from the SOAP service for
fetching message contents, because it’s just too painful.  There are too
many truncated or otherwise mangled messages, and in the end we are just
assembling them back to a good old email to parse them with Arun’s
guile-email.  Going forward mumi will only use the SOAP service to get
bug status information and pointers to messages.  The actual emails will
be fetched through the Debbugs web interface with much cursing.

> P.S. How are we tracking issues and patches for mumi? bug-guix@ and
> guix-patches?

Either of them would be fine.  Please add [mumi] to the subject line so
that it’s easier to distinguish them.

--
Ricardo