Re: very slow archive-mode

[Juri Linkov]

> As I've just found a bug in handling
> no-conversion-multibyte, I'll fix it soon.  After that, I am
> going to change auto-coding-alist to use
> no-conversion-multibyte for archive files, and adjust
> arc-mode and tar-mode.
>
> What do you think?

Thanks in advance for starting to fix this problem.  I think it is
important not to let a buffer associated with the archive file to
stay in the modified state after interrupting its loading.

Using a separate unibyte buffer may be a good solution, but there is one
possible problem: it would be difficult to find this hidden separate
buffer to kill it with the purpose to free up the memory occupied by the
file buffer after interrupting its loading (perhaps, this buffer can be
killed using unwind-protect during loading and kill-buffer-hook for C-x k).

So it seems a separate unibyte buffer would be necessary only if it will
be impossible to get the fast reading without leaving the file buffer
in the modified state.

PS. Fortunately, I had a copy of the corrupted archive on a DVD,
so nothing was lost, but nevertheless this is a damaging problem.

-- 
Juri Linkov
http://www.jurta.org/emacs/