Re: Is it possible to use new Emacsen with non-ASCII?

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>
> Date: Sat, 24 May 2008 06:58:20 +0000 (UTC)
> Bcc: ilya@gnu.org
> Originator: ilya@powdermilk.math.berkeley.edu
> 
> > On May 23, 10:55 am, Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-ab...@ilyaz.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > However, it become harder and harder to document as "a solution"...
> > 
> > A solution to what?
> 
> To work around the fact that by default Emacs is only 7-bit-clean.

Actually, Emacs is not even 7-bit-clean: if the file includes ESC
characters followed by what looks like ISO-2022 encoded non-ASCII
files, Emacs will try to decode those sequences.

I already told numerous times in this thread that being what you call
``7- or 8-bit clean'' is not an Emacs design goal.  Emacs design goal
is to DTRT with text files that include encoded non-ASCII characters.
In the absence of meta-data that would tell Emacs how a given file was
encoded and what encodings are supported by the terminal and the
keyboard, Emacs tries to consult the locale info, and failing that it
tries some guesswork.

When a system is set up such that none of this works, you have to
tinker with Emacs to make it DTRT.  That is your case.  Leaving alone
the philosophical issue of whether a system can be misconfigured or
not, your setup is certainly not within the mainstream of Unix system
setup model.  So it's a small wonder that it requires tinkering.

> Unfortunately, as you saw, even Emacs developers were not able to
> provide a "quite working" solution on the first (and second) try.

Emacs developers are not magicians.  Faced with your strangely
stubborn refusal to describe your system setup in detail, it's a small
wonder that it took many iterations to understand what kind of problem
you have that needs to be solved.  Once this was even remotely clear,
no thanks to you, a working solution was immediately posted for 2
different versions of Emacs, even though you then continued to demand
hand-holding with trivial problems which I'd expect a veteran Emacs
hacker such as yourself to be able to overcome in a matter of seconds.

All in all, it almost sounds like your urge to denigrate Emacs more
often than not overwhelms your own need to get help for solving your
problems.  So much so that you risk leaving your problems unsolved, as
long as you can kick Emacs in the butt.  Good luck with this attitude.