VM autosave doubles Escape character; mangles Japanese etc

This bug report will be sent to the XEmacs Development Team, not to your local site managers!! Please write in English, because the XEmacs maintainers do not have translators to read other languages for them. In XEmacs 21.4 (patch 4) "Artificial Intelligence" [Lucid] (i386-debian-linux, M ule) of Mon Jul 30 2001 on eeyore configured using `configure --with-sound=native,esd '--cflags=-O2 -g -Wall ' --w ith-x11 --extra-verbose --with-site-lisp --statedir=/var/lib --infodir=/usr/shar e/info/xemacs-21.4.4 --prefix=/usr --error-checking=none --debug=no --dynamic -- without-postgresql --with-gpm=no --with_menubars=lucid --with_scrollbars=lucid - -with_dialogs=athena --docdir=/usr/lib/xemacs-21.4.4/i386-debian-linux/mule/ --w ith-mule --with-canna=no --with-wnn=no --with-xim=xlib --with-xfs '--package-pat h=~/.xemacs:~/.xemacs/packages::/usr/share/xemacs21/packages:/usr/share/xemacs21 /mule-packages:/usr/share/xemacs21/site-packages' i386-debian-linux' Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug and the precise symptoms of the bug: In VM, email containing escape characters (i.e. most Japanese email) can get mangled when the folder is auto-saved. If you recover from an auto-saved session then you are likely to see surplus escape characters everywhere. You don't need a Japanese input method to reproduce this. Try this in VM: 1. Send a mail to yourself with a single escape character (looks like ^[) - press Ctrl-Q then Escape - in the message body. 2. Fetch new mail. 3. Do M-x do-auto-save. 4. Examine the file #INBOX# using "less" or a similar tool. You should find that the escape character has been doubled (now there are two of them). Although it is not doubled when the inbox is saved normally (this is only an auto-save thing). And I've only seen this happen in VM (I've tried auto-saving a text file and cannot reproduce it that way). The bug is more serious than the above description would seem, because it mangles messages in ISO-2022 format (most often used by Japanese). When recovering from an autosaved session, such messages will pick up surplus escape characters all over the place. If this is done several times, and the messages containing escape characters are not examined by the user, then the escape characters could multiply up unnoticed (exponential growth - doubles every time) and significantly increase the size of the inbox, causing thrashing and other problems. This happened to me quite a while ago, and I only now understand why. Recent keystrokes: down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down down C-home C-x b I N TAB RET prior next C-x b RET C-x b RET C-x b RET up down up C-x k RET up down C-x b RET down up m s s b 2 2 button1 button1up C-q ESC C-SPC C-end C-w RET button1 button1up home C-k C-k C-k C-k C-k C-k C-c C-c g M-x d o - a u TAB RET misc-user C-] misc -user Recent messages (most recent first): Quit Loading emacsbug...done Loading emacsbug... 36 messages, 1 new, 0 unread, 4 deleted End of message 36 from Silas S. Brown 36 messages, 1 new, 0 unread, 4 deleted No messages were archived Archiving... Got mail from /var/mail/ssb22. Wrote /home/ssb22/INBOX -- Silas S Brown, St John's College Cambridge UK http://www.cus.cam.ac.uk/~ssb22 "He that is hastening to get riches will not remain innocent" - Proverbs 28:20