Re: [PATCH 21.5] Reading and writing abbrev file under MULE

>>>>> "Hrvoje" == Hrvoje Niksic <[email protected]> writes:

    Hrvoje> "Stephen J. Turnbull" <[email protected]> writes:

    Hrvoje> Maybe abbrev-saving code should add a "-*-" coding cookie
    Hrvoje> so the coding system used is explicit?

    >> No.  Coding cookies guarantee corruption, unless the system
    >> automatically maintains them.

    Hrvoje> That's pretty much what I was proposing.  If the coding
    Hrvoje> cookie is added automatically when saving (the abbrev
    Hrvoje> file) and respected when loading it, then it's
    Hrvoje> "automatically maintained" in my book.

We don't have code in place to do the former correctly.

    >> [1] But a system that automatically maintains coding cookies is
    >> nearly equivalent to ISO 2022

    Hrvoje> Almost.  The problem cookies can solve is corruption when
    Hrvoje> the user switches environments.  For example: I work in a
    Hrvoje> Latin 2 environment and use only Latin 2 characters in
    Hrvoje> cookies.  When the abbrev file is saved, no ISO 2022
    Hrvoje> escapes will be used.  But I'd like the abbrev file to be
    Hrvoje> interpreted correctly even if I happen to be in a
    Hrvoje> different environment -- hence the coding cookie.

Or the ISO-2022 magic.  The _only_ difference is that the coding
cookie is human readable and corruptible by people too smart for their
own good.

    Hrvoje> A similar effect could be achieved by forcing UTF-8 or ISO
    Hrvoje> 2022 for saving the abbrev file.  But I prefer the cookie
    Hrvoje> approach, as it allows even a non-Mule XEmacs to edit the
    Hrvoje> resulting cookies (at least for single-byte charsets).

How?  A typical user isn't going to know.  So you need to have some
smarts in abbrev, but how is it going to know?  Looking at the
registry for the font of face 'default?  What if it's "10x20"?  And if
abbrev does get smart, what's so hard about looking up the appropriate
escape sequence in a table?  And what do you expect a non-Mule XEmacs
to do with a Latin-2 abbrev file if started in a Latin-1 environment?

We have good answers for this.  The only problem is users who don't
like UCS-foo, as Nickolay points out.  Too bad.

-- 
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.