On Tuesday 18 October 2005 00:04, MJ Ray wrote:
Matt Parker matt@mpcontracting.co.uk
[...] Since QP is a recognised standard and grep/awk don't support it, don't you think that the pressure should be put onto the makers of those tools to update them rather than put pressure on QP users to take a step backwards? [...]
QP is part of a totally irrelevant standard. You might as well write that IPv6 is a recognised standard, so don't you think that pressure should be put on grep's maintainer to support it? (I'll probably get email about some grep that does now.)
To be honest, I've got no idea about that. It was just quoted at me (Richard Kettlewell wrote "Where's the QP-aware version of grep and awk?") so I gave a response similar to yours - ie, its irrelevant to sending e-mail.
I don't have a resistance to using 8bit, just that KMail came pre-configured to use QP and I'm happy with it.
I think you'll find that either KMail or its users are abusing QP, using it when it adds little but bloat to messages.
Depends what you mean by bloat. You'd have to have written an enormous e-mail to even notice the extra bandwidth. In the old days of 640Kb RAM, 1.44Mb floppies, and 9600 baud modems maybe I'd agree with you, but nowadays, I just can't see that it makes any difference.
Plain 8bit is only a sensible choice from the point of view of people who insist on using tools that don't support it. Personally I'd prefer to step upwards again to using Unicode, but then there'd be a real outcry.
I've been using UTF-8 for some time now, because I need to access characters not in ISO-8859-1, which is why I aim for my setups to use extended mail only when they need to be extended now.
I also need access to extra characters sometimes. Do you find that people have trouble reading UTF-8? I got moaned at by a client whose users all have Pegasus Mail, which doesn't support UTF-8 and all they saw was a load of question marks, so I switched back thinking that there would probably be other mail software out there with similar limitations.
Matt