oh boy. My suggestion is that for sake of uniformity and ease of maintenance, we should convert all the files to use utf-8 instead. Would that make sense?

+1 from me. I think it should not be worse than the current state. :-) (Read: It might break something but that thing is probably already broken now.) But if there is a Mailman expert (definitely not me), please stand up!

In T271123#6719830, @Ladsgroup wrote:

oh boy. My suggestion is that for sake of uniformity and ease of maintenance, we should convert all the files to use utf-8 instead. Would that make sense?

Those files are provided by the debian package, and are not considered convfiguration files. This would mean that every time we update the debian package from the distro, those will get overwritten until the next puppet run; I would prefer not to go down that path, or down the path of rebuilding the package ourselves.

Those files are provided by the debian package, and are not considered convfiguration files. This would mean that every time we update the debian package from the distro, those will get overwritten until the next puppet run; I would prefer not to go down that path, or down the path of rebuilding the package ourselves.

Well, in that case, you’d have to revert the encoding change for all languages, I guess… IIANM all languages not having an encoding compatible with UTF-8 are broken with this right now. (I randomly tested a subscription request in Polish and Japanese, both e-mails were broken.)

The problem is that if we revert that (or for example change the pt_BR to iso-8859-1 instead of utf-8), pages like https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/unblock-pt-l would break. The proper solution is the upgrade to mailman3 (T52864: Upgrade GNU Mailman from 2.1 to Mailman3)

Yes, they would break because they are in the wrong encoding.

Change 654915 had a related patch set uploaded (by Herron; owner: Herron):
[operations/puppet@production] mailman: set Czech language to iso-8859-2

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/654915

In T271123#6729318, @gerritbot wrote:

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/654915

In my testing this corrected the issue with broken characters on listinfo

Change 654915 merged by Herron:
[operations/puppet@production] mailman: set Czech language to iso-8859-2

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/654915

Was hoping for some feedback on the above patch, but since it's been a few days I've gone ahead and merged it. The listinfo page in this task description looks to have improved to me, in that copy/pasting a sampling of text into a translator gives back a meaningful result. How does it look to you @Mormegil?

Well, yes, for Czech, the subscription confirmation e-mail seems to be sent correctly, now. But as I said above, it is a problem for all languages using non-utf8 encoding in Mailman. E.g. Polish is still broken (“Pro�ba o potwierdzenie zapisania si� na list�”).

And interestingly, the confirmation page at https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/subscribe/wikimediacz-l is partially broken for Czech (“WikimediaCZ-l Výsledky přihlášení / ObdrĹželi jsme VaĹĄĂ­ Şådost o přihlĂĄĹĄenĂ­ do konference.”) but correct for Polish (“Została otrzymana prośba o zapisanie się.”). But that is not that important.

That's what I have been saying, if you fix something, it breaks something else. It's a whack-a-mole at the current state.

In T271123#6752321, @Mormegil wrote:

Well, yes, for Czech, the subscription confirmation e-mail seems to be sent correctly, now. But as I said above, it is a problem for all languages using non-utf8 encoding in Mailman. E.g. Polish is still broken (“Pro�ba o potwierdzenie zapisania si� na list�”).

Does this still need fixing? (Maybe this task should be renamed to be more than just Czech?)