Matt Parker matt@mpcontracting.co.uk writes:
Who cares? If I want to search my e-mail I use KMail's search function. How you search your e-mails is your business. 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?
It seems a shame that someone posting to a UNIX-related mailing list has apparently forgotten the advantages of general-purpose tools working on plain text files.
I don't have a resistance to using 8bit, just that KMail came pre-configured to use QP and I'm happy with it. Plain 8bit is only a sensible choice from the point of view of people who insist on using tools that don't support it.
So we should abandon a huge collection of widely used and well-standardized tools just because you're too lazy to change a badly thought out default? Right...
Personally I'd prefer to step upwards again to using Unicode, but then there'd be a real outcry.
The choice of 8bit or QP is orthogonal to use of Unicode, in fact. UTF-8 is pretty widely used these days, including in email.