Re: Mule status

>>>>> "Jon" == Jon Ericson <[email protected]> writes:

    Jon> "David A. Cobb" <[email protected]> writes:

    >> I won't ask whether it does everything it should.  However, is
    >> it currently possible to build a stable xemacs with
    >> "--enable-mule" that will do something readable with a
    >> (M$-Windowz) Unicode file?

It's possible that it would work (you also need the mule-base and
mule-ucs packages, at least), and if it does, it would work well
(redisplay algorithms are fine, Lisp editing functions are fine, the
problems mostly have to do with keyboard input and finding fonts).
However the stable version of XEmacs was considered to be unusable by
people who _need_ Mule in the Windows environment (eg, Japanese or
non-Latin-1 Europeans who need to have both Latin-1 and their native
script in the same instance of Emacs).

You really should be using 21.5 if you _need_ Mule features under
Windows.

If the formats and character sets you need to deal with are quite
limited, Unicode is very regular and it would be easy to write a
simple function which "washes" the file from Unicode to some 8-bit
character set, and another to do the reverse before saving.  This of
course is quite risky, if you forget to wash to Unicode before saving
other apps which expect Unicode will get a tummyache.

    Jon> I built a CVS[1] version with the following configure command
    Jon> line:

    Jon>   configure '--pdump' '--with-postgresql=no' '--with-mule'
    Jon> '--with-x11=no' '--with-msw'

    Jon> For the things I do (English, Spanish, and spam various in
    Jon> various languages), Mule seems to be working fine.

Many people are using Mule on Windows with 21.5, and as far as I know
it works as well as the Unix version.  (Which is to say there are
still a lot of rough edges but the core features are there, and the
problems basically amount to Lisp programs using old crufty APIs are
getting unexpectedly clean APIs from 21.5. ;-)

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