bug with start-process and start-process-shell-command

With XEmacs 21.5.x, it appears to be impossible to start a process in an UTF-8 locale and give non-ASCII text as command line arguments. This is very annoying, no external program works correctly anymore if a non-ASCII command line is needed. For example M-x grep doesn't work anymore when grepping for non-ASCII and playing .mp3 files with mpg123.el doesn't work anymore if the filenames are non-ASCII because they are given as arguments to the external mpg123 program. A small lisp file start-process-bug.el to show the problem is attached. When trying this test file with XEmacs 21.5.18, the result is as follows (should better be tried in an UTF-8 capable environment to see the output correctly): mfabian＠magellan:~/xemacs-bug$ xemacs -q -batch -l start-process-bug.el XEmacs 21.5 (beta18) "chestnut" (+CVS-20041021) [Lucid] (x86_64-suse-linux, Mule) of Fri Dec 31 2004 on magellan mfabian＠magellan:~/xemacs-bug$ And now the output file contains: mfabian＠magellan:~/xemacs-bug$ cat /tmp/start-process-bug A~ mfabian＠magellan:~/xemacs-bug$ mfabian＠magellan:~/xemacs-bug$ hex < /tmp/start-process-bug 0000 41 7e e4 0a A~.. mfabian＠magellan:~/xemacs-bug$ I.e. the letter 'A' has arrived correctly but the hiragana 'あ' has been converted into a '~' and the ä has been written as Latin1 and not UTF-8. This used to work with XEmacs 21.4.x. Trying the same test with XEmacs 21.4.15 gives the following result: mfabian＠baker:~/xemacs-bug$ xemacs -q -batch -l start-process-bug.el XEmacs 21.4 (patch 15) "Security Through Obscurity" [Lucid] (i386-suse-linux, Mule) of Thu Oct 14 2004 on appolonius requiring un-define ... mfabian＠baker:~/xemacs-bug$ cat /tmp/start-process-bug Aあä mfabian＠baker:~/xemacs-bug$ hex < /tmp/start-process-bug 0000 41 e3 81 82 c3 a4 0a A...... mfabian＠baker:~/xemacs-bug$ which is correct. -- Mike FABIAN <mfabian(a)suse.de&gt; http://www.suse.de/~mfabian 睡眠不足はいい仕事の敵だ。