[hypermail] Option for conversion to UTF-8

[Peter C. McCluskey]

due...@w3.org (Martin Duerst) writes:
>One question I currently have is the choice of option for this setting.
>I choose -8 as the option, because -u was already taken. But if there is
>a preference for something else, I can change that. Any comments/opinions?

If there's a reason for having a command line option for this, -8 sounds
good. But we have more options than we can reasonably fit into single-char
options, and most new options are being specified only via .hmrc. I'm
uncertain whether we should make this option available from the command line.
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[Martin Duerst]

Hello Peter,

At 09:46 04/01/09 -0800, Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
> due...@w3.org (Martin Duerst) writes:
> >One question I currently have is the choice of option for this setting.
> >I choose -8 as the option, because -u was already taken. But if there is
> >a preference for something else, I can change that. Any comments/opinions?
>
> If there's a reason for having a command line option for this, -8 sounds
>good. But we have more options than we can reasonably fit into single-char
>options, and most new options are being specified only via .hmrc. I'm
>uncertain whether we should make this option available from the command line.

Many thanks for your advice! Besides new vs. old, are there any other
criteria for what ends up as an option and what not? One scenario I
can imagine is that an archive wants to use UTF-8 for some mailing
lists (those with mixed language contributions), whereas not with
others. That might be easier to control with an option than with
.hmrc. But I'm okay to remove the option if it's not needed.

As for the .hmrc (or test.rc in my case), I currently have the
following entry in setup.c:

{"utf8", &set_utf8, BFALSE, CFG_SWITCH,
"# Set this to On to produce all output encoded as UTF-8\n"
"# to avoid problems with mixed encodings.", FALSE},

This means that the name of the setting in .hmrc is "utf8", and
the variable in the program is "set_utf8". Does that look okay,
or should I change that?

Regards, Martin.

[Peter C.McCluskey]

due...@w3.org (Martin Duerst) writes:
>Hello Peter,
>
>At 09:46 04/01/09 -0800, Peter C. McCluskey wrote:
>> due...@w3.org (Martin Duerst) writes:
>> >One question I currently have is the choice of option for this setting.
>> >I choose -8 as the option, because -u was already taken. But if there is
>> >a preference for something else, I can change that. Any comments/opinions?
>>
>> If there's a reason for having a command line option for this, -8 sounds
>>good. But we have more options than we can reasonably fit into single-char
>>options, and most new options are being specified only via .hmrc. I'm
>>uncertain whether we should make this option available from the command line.
>
>Many thanks for your advice! Besides new vs. old, are there any other
>criteria for what ends up as an option and what not? One scenario I
>can imagine is that an archive wants to use UTF-8 for some mailing
>lists (those with mixed language contributions), whereas not with
>others. That might be easier to control with an option than with
>.hmrc. But I'm okay to remove the option if it's not needed.

If a moderate number of people are likely to use both values for
this option on the same system, then having a command line option is
a good choice. I have no idea whether this is the case, and it sounds
like you know more about this than I do.

>As for the .hmrc (or test.rc in my case), I currently have the
>following entry in setup.c:
>
> {"utf8", &set_utf8, BFALSE, CFG_SWITCH,
> "# Set this to On to produce all output encoded as UTF-8\n"
> "# to avoid problems with mixed encodings.", FALSE},
>
>This means that the name of the setting in .hmrc is "utf8", and
>the variable in the program is "set_utf8". Does that look okay,
>or should I change that?

That looks good.