Re: Don't set coding-system in shell-mode

Ben> Moved to xemacs-beta. I disagree. We always want to be Ben> automatic when possible -- i.e. option 1. We don't want to Ben> burden the user with extra work -- i.e. #3. Being automatic is possible only when the user knows what he is doing. We need to be very careful that users do not get wedged into coding systems they don't know how to get out of. This is one of Hrvoje's prime complaints about Mule; it can and does destroy data because of coding-system wedging. It is also dependent on correct setting of the language environment. ISO-8859-1 v. ISO-8859-2 is the canonical case, of course, but EUC-JP vs. ISO-8859-1 is also likely to hose you; these can only be distinguished by heuristics that depend on character frequency and serial correlations. Remember, you can't do the equivalent of `C-x C-k RET C-u C-x C-f "file" RET "the-right-encoding" RET' on a terminal stream yet. I think we should do something like buffer the first screenful, do autodetect on it, and `C-x C-m c' should (optionally?) offer a menu including coding systems and a line of sample text from the buffer to show the user what they are getting. Still, this only works for files with meaning as text. -- University of Tsukuba Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091 _________________ _________________ _________________ _________________ What are those straight lines for? "XEmacs rules."