Re: [Bug: 21.4.10] hexl-find-file: void get-coding-system

Jouni> * According to the INSTALL file, "The Mule support is not Jouni> yet as stable or efficient as the `Latin1' support." This is still pedantically true, but should not stop anyone with a modern machine (Pentium 200MHz or better) from building with Mule, except in a few special cases. Thanks for reporting, I'll fix that. Jouni> * My experiences with GNU Emacs 20.* have made me associate Jouni> Mule with unpredictable breakage even when only using Jouni> Latin-1. Has Mule become stable enough that even we Jouni> Latin-1-speaking people should enable it? Red Hat et al seem to think so; they do not provide non-mule packages anymore. We never had the kind of breakage that GNU Emacs had with internal encodings (the infamous \201 characters) leaking into files. However, there are two kinds of breakage that you might encounter in XEmacs with Mule: 1) Mistaken recognition of encodings in binary files, leading to data lossage. That is, binary files will often randomly contain sequences that look like ISO 2022 escapes, this will trigger decoding of the file, which is sometimes irreversible; if that buffer is saved, you get file corruption. This can be almost completely avoided by properly use of `set-coding-priority-list'. However the default assumes that you are reading text files and relatively aggressive decoding is enabled. 2) With European integration, the traditional Mule treatment of the ISO-8859 family as disjoint character sets has become untenable. Both GNU Emacs and XEmacs provide facilities to deal with identification of characters that are common to different Latin sets, but both are as yet pretty raw. I have personally experienced breakage from this; I _think_ it is specific to my very unusual set up, but it's possible that people could induce the same bug by configuring the `latin-unity' package. 3) People have experienced problems with process buffers that may be Mule-related. I think that for sites which use Latin-1, but would like to have access to the Euro character (Latin-9) and may receive mails written in other Latin character sets the advantages of Mule now far outweigh the disadvantages. Jouni> If so, shouldn't it be recommended in the documentation? It's really very site-specific, but probably in Europe it should be recommended. In the U.S. it's not necessary for many, perhaps most users. In Asia, Emacs is unusable without Mule, of course. -- Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Ask not how you can "do" free software business; ask what your business can "do for" free software.