Re: Why multibyte for original-article buffer

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

>>>>> Stefan Monnier wrote:

> I've been running with the following patch with good results.
> Also the patch makes sense to me: the original article is a sequence of
> bytes (i.e. encoded chars), so a unibyte buffer makes a lot of sense
> (it's more efficient and is likely to hide fewer bugs).

So, it is better to make also the " *nntpd*" buffer, the process
buffer for pop3, etc. be unibyte.  If such changes cause a problem,
it will be due to a code that copies data from those buffers to
a multibyte buffer and then decodes the data.  Actually, making
the original article buffer be unibyte prevents me from reading
a Japanese 8bit shift_jis message like this.

日本語

(Try `g' in the summary buffer.)

> Yet the code currently explicitly sets the buffer to multibyte mode.
> Does anybody know why?

IIRC, it was done about ten years ago.  I guess it was probably
a workaround for a problem like the one mentioned above.

> --- gnus-art.el.~1.154.~	2008-02-28 14:10:39.000000000 -0500
> +++ gnus-art.el	2008-02-28 14:09:51.000000000 -0500
> @@ -4342,7 +4342,7 @@
>      (gnus-article-setup-highlight-words)
>      ;; Init original article buffer.
>      (with-current-buffer (gnus-get-buffer-create gnus-original-article-buffer)
> -      (mm-enable-multibyte)
> +      (mm-disable-multibyte)
>        (setq major-mode 'gnus-original-article-mode)
>        (make-local-variable 'gnus-original-article))
>      (if (and (get-buffer name)

It is beyond my capacity to verify (and possibly to fix) all the
Gnus codes that copy data from there to somewhere.

Regards,