Hi,
The Fedora Linux project and Red Hat are pushing very hard for good
internationalisation support. That means UTF-8 support in every single
app they ship even if it may cause interoperability problems with old
applications (the common feeling is if we wait for everyone to jump on
the unicode boat before using unicode, we'll still be waiting in ten
years).
Squirrelmail by default does not use UTF-8 for many of its locales,
causing character losses when you reply to a message that contains
characters not available in the encoding declared for your locale.
To workaround this all the locales in the fedora squirrelmail version
are converted to UTF-8 at build time (cf attached build script). This
fixes interoperability between locales, since all characters in a
received message now fit inside the locale encoding, so quoting people
when replying to them now work.
Unfortunately this fix has unearthed a problem with squirrelmail
handling of imap folders. squirrelmail seems to assume 7bit imap folder
names, as soon as you try do display a folder name that use >7bit
characters in an UTF-8 locale things break (it doesn't with 8bit iso
locales, probably because so many bits assume iso-8859-1 transcoding
problems cancel one another).
With an UTF-8 locale SM won't display properly non-ascii folder names
when those have been created by another mail client, if you
recreate/rename the folders in squirrelmail display is now fine inside
SM but broken for everyone else.
Many common default folders use >7bit encodings in many locales (Sent ->
"Éléments envoyés" in French) so you're almost certain to hit this bug
as soon as you use an UTF-8 locale that actually needs >7bit for naming
folders. It's not a problem that can be ignored if one wants to ship and
i18n SM.
Can someone familiar with squirrelmail fix the imap folder encoding code
when local is UTF-8-enabled ? This is a bit too much to do at the Fedora
level (especially since Fedora tries to stay close to upstream). If not
Fedora will have to accept SM won't do UTF-8 sanely any time soon, which
will mean SM removal according to Fedora internal rules.
Various bug reports related to the problem :
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=162852
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1339393&group_id...
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=423691&aid=1235...
Regards,
--
Nicolas Mailhot