Re: naive charset question

[Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com>]

Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org> writes:

> Simon Josefsson <jas@extundo.com> writes:
>>>   (standard-display-european 1)
>> Yup.  Should Gnus make an effort to work in this case?
>
>> status.  Perhaps Gnus should require non-unibyte Emacs?  But you sort
>> of get what you asked for if you disable multibyte -- you don't get
>> any multibytes, even in Gnus.  Perhaps Gnus could fail more gracefully
>> though.  Hm.
>
> While standard-display-european may make unibyte the default, it
> doesn't seem to actually disable multibyte support.  I can run
>
>         emacs -q --unibyte --eval '(standard-display-european 1)'
>
> and the HELLO file still displays with some Asian, Cyrillic, Hebrew
> and other characters, and enable-multibyte-characters still winds up
> set to t in the help buffer.

C-h h overrides the default multibyte setting.  Message in Gnus do
not.  By the code this looks quite intentional (see `mm-emacs-mule',
`mm-enable-multibyte').  So if you disable multibyte, Gnus becomes
unibyte and always uses the preferred coding system.  This seems like
a good You Get What You Asked For approach, but perhaps a warning is
in order?  Opinions?

If you want to re-enable multibyte for message, it is possible to frob
default-enable-multibyte-characters when sending the message and it
will work.  Unfortunately it is not enough to re-enable multibyte in
the message buffer alone, the code uses the global default value.

The warning could thus offer to re-enable multibyte temporarily when
sending the message.