chinese-gbk

[Katsumi Yamaoka <yamaoka@jpl.org>]

Hi (Handa-san? :-),

Is it possible to implement the `chinese-gbk' coding system (and
also the charset) to the EMACS_22_BASE branch (i.e., Emacs 22.2)?
I heard that some Chinese messages use the gbk charset which is
a superset of gb2312.  A shar'd sample message is in:

http://article.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.gnus.general/65424

(To extract a message, save a sh script part to a file, do chmod +x,
 and execute it.)

Currently Gnus makes gbk be an alias to cp936 if gbk is not
available.  However, though I'm ignorant in Chinese, I can
observe it doesn't work like it does in the Emacs Unicode-2.
That is, gbk that is an alias to cp936 in Gnus is no more than
a workaround for preventing the `Unknown charset' error (if
there's no additional means to provide gbk, like [1]).  Maybe to
support gbk becomes indispensable like windows-1252 for Latin-1.

Regards,

[1] http://cache.gmane.org//gmane/emacs/gnus/general/65432-001.bin
(Another package, named `mule-gbk', is also available but it
 requires cns11643.*-5,6,7 fonts, which in the intlfonts package
 seem to be incomplete.)