Leave clearsigned content encoding alone, how?

[Michael Kjorling]

I use gnupg-1.4.1 on GNU/Linux (up-to-date Gentoo, Linux 2.6.12 on
AMD64 if it matters) to sign and encrypt my mail, and everything is
fine as long as I stay with strictly us-ascii. However, when I use
other characters (mostly national characters covered by iso-8859-15),
gnupg converts the input data to UTF-8 when signing, wreaking havoc
with those characters. The fact that gnupg converts back when
verifying or decrypting the data only makes matters worse since *I* am
unaware of the problem that others face in reading my e-mails.

My gnupg.conf explicitly states "charset iso-8859-15" so that cannot
really be the problem. (It's the only charset-related setting in
effect for gnupg, I have checked and triple-checked this.) My MUA,
muttng, correctly identifies the input data prior to signing as
iso-8859-15 and after signing as utf-8, but a lot of mailers don't
seem to deal very well with UTF-8 data. Not clearsigning the message
avoids this problem, but is hardly an ideal solution. PGP/MIME signing
is not really an option either, considering the number of broken MUAs
out there.

This appears to only be a problem with clearsigned messages, not
PGP/MIME messages (for some odd reason) which leads to my question:

How do I get gnupg to ignore the charset of the input data and just
leave it *as is* when clearsigning?

The exact command lines used are (long):

Clearsigning: /usr/bin/gpg --no-verbose  --batch  --quiet  --output -  --passphrase-fd 0  --armor  --textmode  --clearsign  -u $SIGNING_KEY_ID  $FILENAME

PGP/MIME signing: /usr/bin/gpg --no-verbose  --batch  --quiet  --output -  --passphrase-fd 0  --armor  --detach-sign  --textmode  -u $SIGNING_KEY_ID  $FILENAME

No radical differences there, the only one I can see is --clearsign
and --detach-sign and the ordering of --textmode and the signing
option.

I looked through the archives for almost a year back and couldn't find
anything of relevance, but if I missed something, please feel free to
let me know.

-- 
Michael Kjörling, michael at kjorling.com - http://michael.kjorling.com/
* ASCII Ribbon Campaign: Against HTML Mail, Proprietary Attachments *
* ..... No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings ..... *
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