Intent to implement Emacs 20 find-file-literally

mb> Is there some reason we did not implement this? Is this mb> function perhaps ideologically blasphemous? IMHO, yes. `find-file' itself is an interactive function intended to be bound to a key. It does a whole bunch of things that (allegedly) users expect to have done for them when visiting files, checking for an existing buffer visiting the file, calling hooks, decoding coding systems, uncompressing, decrypting, setting modes, and stuff like that. In that sense "find-file-literally" is an oxymoron. The name certainly doesn't tell me what you plan to incorporate in the function. I assume that it won't decode, uncompress, or decrypt. But how about checking for existing buffers? Calling hooks? Setting modes? In the case of hexl-mode, all of these are tricky, dangerous, or unnecessary. But a user who calls `find-file-literally' on foo.tar.gz might very well expect that to invoke `targz-mode' without uncompressing the file. And for some hook functions she might expect it to share `find-file-hooks' but for others of course that would be disastrous. `insert-file-contents-literally' doesn't have this ambiguity. I would prefer that you implement the functionality specifically needed for `hexl-mode' using i-f-c-l, named "hexl-find-file\(-literally\)?". If experience shows that f-f-l itself is needed and has a fairly unambiguous definition, then implement it. If you must implement it for FSF compatibility, document loudly that it's defined the way it is for FSF compatibility and may or may not Do The Right Thing in any given context. And we should think about whether there are better ways to deal with the increasingly complex layers of file handlers invoked by functions like `find-file', especially in the contexts of Mule, EFS, and jka-compr. -- 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."