[Rd] Double HTML encoding in R Bug Tracking Submission form (PR#11517)

[Peter Dalgaard]

Peter Dalgaard wrote:
> mwtoews at sfu.ca wrote:
>> The "New Bug Report" form available from http://bugs.r-project.org/
>> appears to double encode the HTML of the "body" text area of the form.
>>
>> This behaviour can be seen in submission ID # 11515, where (as an
>> example) "Δ" is converted to "Δ" in the browser view or
>> "Δ" in the HTML source code. Conversion to "Δ" in the
>> HTML source is sufficient to render "Δ" in the browser output.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>>   
> Well, the repository handles emails, and the report form sends mail to
> the bug repository.
>
> The report form sends HTML codes without any indication that it is
> doing so, so the codes get rendered in the browser view. This latter
> part is actually correct behaviour since the alternative is to mangle
> all ampersands. So the main bug is that the report form is not
> mail-encoding the contents if non-ASCII.
>
> *However*, even with properly encoded mails, the browser view will not
> interpret the encoding, which is particularly annoying with
> quoted-printable (which uses the equal sign as an escape character and
> changes = to =3D). Also, see what happens with my signature which has
> a UTF-8 character inside.
>
> All in all, the whole mess indicates that the bug repository software
> is dying. It has long since been abandoned by its original author and
> it makes no sense for the R Core Team to make major changes to its
> internals. We've been wanting to move to something more mainstream for
> quite a while, but it takes some effort to find out how to move all
> the old pending and resolved reports across.
>
(Not to mention the fact that, apparently, Thunderbird auto-wraps
outgoing mail on SUSE and not on Fedora... *Sigh*.  Sorry about that.
You'd think that people could get this sort of stuff working after one
score and seventeen years of email...)

-- 
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