[Python-Dev] PEP 383: Non-decodable Bytes in System Character Interfaces (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Mon Apr 27 13:29:14 CEST 2009

Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen xemacs.org> writes:

If you see a broken encoding once, you're likely to see it a million times (spammers have the most broken software) or maybe have it raise an unhandled Exception a dozen times (in rate of using busted software, the spammers are closely followed by bosses---which would be very bad, eh, if you 2/3 of the mail from your boss ends up in an undeliverables queue due to encoding errors that are unhandled by your some filter in your mail pipeline).

I'm not sure how mail being stuck in a pipeline has anything to do with Martin's proposal (which deals with file paths, not with SMTP...). Besides, I don't care about spammers and their broken software.

Again, that's not the point. The point is that six-sigma reliability world-wide is not going to be very comforting to the poor souls who happen to have broken software in their environment sending broken encodings regularly, because they're going to be dealing with one or two sigmas, and that's just not good enough in a production environment.

So you're arguing that whatever solution which isn't 100% perfect but only 99.999% perfect shouldn't be implemented at all, and leave the status quo at 98%? This sounds disturbing to me.

(especially given you probably sent this mail using TCP/IP...)

Regards

Antoine.

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