[Patch] internatinal domain names for email addresses

[David Shaw]

On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 05:46:04PM +0100, Thomas Kuehne wrote:
> David Shaw wrote:
> >On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 04:50:47PM +0100, Thomas Kuehne wrote:
> >
> >>1) key selection:
> >>gpg --edit-key user at xn--fiq228c.idn.kuehne.cn
> >>gpg --edit-key user@??????.idn.kuehne.cn
> >
> >
> >Perhaps I am missing something, but it strikes me that users should
> >never be using the punycode format directly.  This is an encoding to
> >accomodate software that cannot handle unicode.
> 
> No it's not only to accomodate legacy software. The underlying DNS
> protocoll simply doesn't support "raw" Unicode.

Sure, but GnuPG isn't a mail program :) There is no need to store user
IDs as punycode which is just a unicode representation.  Store them as
actual unicode and let the mail program convert if it needs to.

> I think it's imposible to generate regexps that match IDN parts.
> 
> "öü" ->  "xn--ndam"
> but
> "äöü" -> "xn--4ca0bs"

I don't see why someone would want to translate back and forth between
punycode and unicode *inside GnuPG*.  If the ultimate goal is a
unicode user ID, just use unicode.  When searching for a user ID that
is unicode, enter unicode search terms.  Use punycode only where you
can't use unicode (DNS).

Will the regexp code in GnuPG do the right thing when matching utf8
against utf8 ?  Anything else is an apples to oranges comparison.

David