Re: slrn and UTF-8

On Wednesday 02 May 2007 09:40, Dan H. wrote:

> So what's the deal? Is slrn actually actively supported any more, or will I
> have to look at an alternative newsreader? The homepage seems to be of
> October 2004 vintage; this doesn't look too active any more..

Development seems to be slow, but hasn't stopped as far as I'm aware, and the 
Debian package is certainly alive.

For your problem with UTF-8 and messages that use legacy character sets, there 
are two possibilities:

1. Use the latest CVS version of Slrn. The easiest way to do this on Debian at 
present is to install the package from Debian Experimental.
http://packages.debian.org/experimental/news/slrn

There will still be issues with messages that don't declare a character set or 
are otherwise defective, but most problems with umlauts and other non-ASCII 
characters ought to be solved.

2. If you use Slrn in an X-terminal-emulator, try this rather clumsy 
workaround, which sets the locale for Slrn to one of the legacy character 
sets. Leave UTF-8 as the default.

# dpkg-reconfigure -plow locales

Choose the locales you want to support.

# apt-get install luit

Luit may already be installed; if so you'll get a harmless error message.

Add an alias to .bashrc as follows:

alias slrnx='LANG=en_GB.iso88591 luit -v -encoding "ISO 8859-1" sh -c "sleep 
1; slrn -w"'

(That shouldn't be wrapped, of course, and you'll need to adjust the locale 
and encoding to suit your needs.)

This sets the language and encoding for Slrn to use, waits one second to get 
around a bug in luit, and then starts Slrn with the -w option so you can 
check that everything is correct before continuing.

$ slrnx

The disadvantage of this method is that you lose the benefits of UTF-8, but I 
was using it for many weeks without problems before I switched to the CVS 
version. It also doesn't work if you use Slrn without X.

-- 
PJR :-)

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