Re: Emacs unicode merge changes to Gnus

[Reiner Steib <reinersteib+gmane@imap.cc>]

On Wed, Feb 06 2008, Miles Bader wrote:

>> This could cause problems for people switching (from Emacs 23) to
>> Emacs <= 22 (or XEmacs).  AFAICS, Emacs 21 and 22 simply ignore the
>> cookie if the coding is unknown.  I'd expect problems for people using
>> e.g. non-ASCII group names.  

WARNING: I just notice that the drafts articles saved with Emacs 23
are messed up when read with Emacs 22.  So I'd recommend not to switch
between Emacs 22 and 23 for now.

>> Any ideas how to fix this problem?
>
> It seems like this change wouldn't affect that case either way:  if
> they switch emacs to an old version, and gnus-ding-file-coding-system
> is something unknown, and they actually have some non-ascii chars in
> there, they're screwed, whether with the old code or the new code.

Thanks for your comments.  I will come back to it when I have more
time (Friday, I hope) to think about your mail.  For now, just a few
remarks...

> There's a case where the old code could work better, if the file is
> written with utf-8-emacs (the default now, I guess), and the
> switched-to-system happens to use a coding system of utf-8 which is
> largely compatible; for Emacs 21, this won't happen (the switcher is
> just plain screwed in this case, no matter what, I think), as Emacs 21
> doesn't support utf-8.

Emacs 21 has support for utf-8 to some limited extend (for European,
latin languages, its quite sufficient).

> Now, the new code could also work (more properly, instead of by
> accident) in the switching-to-emacs-22 case, if Gnus used a coding:
> tag of "utf-8" instead of "utf-8-emacs" when possible.

This will probably not work well for people switching between Emacs
and XEmacs.

Bye, Reiner.
-- 
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      (o o)
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