Mike> I don't understand this. If the system is running in an Mike> UTF-8 locale, XEmacs should assume that the external Mike> applications handle UTF-8. Oh, come on, Mike. You've been to Japan, you've dealt with Japanese applications. You've probably read Ohta's "Ima Nihongo ga Abunai." Maybe in the rest of the world, but it's just not a safe assumption in this country. And I doubt it's a safe assumption in the US, either. It's also definitely unsafe to assume that users understand the implications of their locale settings. You know what happens to "grep [a-z]" in many locales, and I imagine SuSE gets as many bug reports as Debian does. Mike> I.e. by switching from ja_JP.UTF-8 to ja_JP.eucJP in Mike> (set-language-environment "Japanese") Mike> creates more problems than it solves. I'm not arguing the specific case (I'll let Ben do that if he has a reason for it), just the general principle. From the comments in that file, I suspect that it was simply the case that the X11R6 implementation from which Ben took his data had no UTF-8 locales at the time, and ja_JP.eucJP is simply the closest match. But I don't have time to confirm that right now. Note that this just shows how broken POSIX locales are: you can't work with them sanely unless you have a complete database of the available set, and know the relevant semantics. Mike> the default should be the locale set in the environment when Mike> XEmacs starts. This may be true on SuSE. But I doubt it. Dired should default to running ls in the POSIX locale on all systems I know of, EFS should default to running ftp in the POSIX locale, etc. I really think that the right design for XEmacs is to save the locale, then set it to POSIX, and run applications in locales of XEmacs's choosing. If XEmacs is functioning merely as a command shell for the user, you're right, it should choose the user's locale. But if XEmacs is parsing the output, it needs more control. Mike> Using only UTF-8 cleans up the mess a lot and makes it Mike> possible to forget about the encoding most of the time. Good for SuSE, and I encourage you to set up SuSE's XEmacs package that way. We'll work with you to make that easier and more reliable, but at this point it's not obvious to me that making that the XEmacs default is a good idea or will be acceptable to the Review Board. -- 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.