Several serious problems

Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

I cannot save the file lisp/ChangeLog.  It specifies coding system
iso-2022-7bit, but it contains something that cannot be encoded in that
coding system.  I don't know any way to find the text that causes the
problem; essentially I am helpless.

Handa-san, would you please clean up whatever is wrong with that file
so that it can save properly once again?

We MUST do something to make it easier for users to cope with such a
situation.  We talked about this a few weeks ago but nothing was done.
Perhaps we could add a command which simply scans forward for the next
run of characters that can't be saved in the specified coding system.
The message you get in that situation could tell you about this
command.  This would be a powerful solution, since you could easily
find all the problems, not just the first one.  Highlighting all of
them would also be a useful thing to do.

This problem prevented me from commiting changes to the file from
Emacs.  I was able to edit and save the file using
find-file-literally, but when I tried to commit the changes, C-x v v
tried to revisit the file non-literally.  I think that is a serious
bug in VC.  VC should cope with visiting a file literally.
Andre, would you please fix that?

So I tried typing `cd lisp; cvs commit ChangeLog'.  It put me into
vi to ask me to edit a log message.  Damn!  I killed it, set EDITOR
and VISUAL to `emacs', and tried again.  This time it gave me Emacs
to edit with.  I deleted all the text, saved the log message file,
and exited Emacs.  cvs obnoxiously complained about the empty log
message and asked me what to do.  I typed `c RET' meaning "continue".

At that point it never came back to me.  Now the emacs/lisp directory
is locked and nobody can do anything in it any more.

Savannah people, would you please delete the lock?

Re: Several serious problems

[Andre Spiegel]

> Handa-san, would you please clean up whatever is wrong with that file
> so that it can save properly once again?

When I visit the ChangeLog, Kai's most recent entry from 2002-07-21
displays with a german sharp 's' (ß), but all of his former entries have
a \337 in place of it.

Re: Several serious problems

[Andre Spiegel]

> This problem prevented me from commiting changes to the file from
> Emacs.  I was able to edit and save the file using
> find-file-literally, but when I tried to commit the changes, C-x v v
> tried to revisit the file non-literally.  I think that is a serious
> bug in VC.  VC should cope with visiting a file literally.
> Andre, would you please fix that?

It is fixed now.  I've installed the patch in vc.el, but haven't made an
entry in the ChangeLog yet, since it still seems corrupted.  Will do so
after it's been cleaned up.

Re: Several serious problems

[Andreas Schwab]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

|> I cannot save the file lisp/ChangeLog.  It specifies coding system
|> iso-2022-7bit, but it contains something that cannot be encoded in that
|> coding system.  I don't know any way to find the text that causes the
|> problem; essentially I am helpless.

It was the last commit by Carsten Dominik which broke the file.  I have
now fixed it by visiting as iso-latin-1, fixing the two remaining iso-2022
encoded characters and then saving it again in the right encoding.

Andreas.

-- 
Andreas Schwab, SuSE Labs, schwab@suse.de
SuSE Linux AG, Deutschherrnstr. 15-19, D-90429 Nürnberg
Key fingerprint = 58CA 54C7 6D53 942B 1756  01D3 44D5 214B 8276 4ED5
"And now for something completely different."

Re: Several serious problems

[Andre Spiegel]

> This problem prevented me from commiting changes to the file from
> Emacs.  I was able to edit and save the file using
> find-file-literally, but when I tried to commit the changes, C-x v v
> tried to revisit the file non-literally.  I think that is a serious
> bug in VC.  VC should cope with visiting a file literally.
> Andre, would you please fix that?

It is fixed now.  I've installed the patch in vc.el, but haven't made an
entry in the ChangeLog yet, since it still seems corrupted.  Will do so
after it's been cleaned up. 

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

Thanks for jumping right on the problem.

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> We MUST do something to make it easier for users to cope with such a
> situation.  We talked about this a few weeks ago but nothing was done.

Yes, you are right.

As said months ago I hve to fix those files quite often; users don't how
to do it on their own.  Often it's getting even worse: Emacs proposes a
"secure" encoding and when users go for it, all looks well until you
want to process such a file with TeX...

Please add this issue to etc/TODO.

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <200207221711.g6MHBZo02496@aztec.santafe.edu>, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> I cannot save the file lisp/ChangeLog.  It specifies coding system
> iso-2022-7bit, but it contains something that cannot be encoded in that
> coding system.  

It seem that this problem was already fixed.  As I also
found one unnecessary mule-unicode-0100-24ff char, I deleted
it.

> I don't know any way to find the text that causes the
> problem; essentially I am helpless.

At least, (find-charset-region 1 (point-max)) will give you
some information.  If the returned value contains a
suspicious charset, we can search it (if it's not
eight-bit-xxx) by:
	(re-search-forward "[%c-%c]"
			   (make-char CHARSET 32 32) 
			   (make-char CHARSET 127 127))
To search for eight-bit-control:
	(re-search-forward "[\200-\237]")
To search for eight-bit-graphic:
	(re-search-forward (string-as-multibyte "[\240-\377]"))
It's not sophisticated.  :-(

> We MUST do something to make it easier for users to cope with such a
> situation.  We talked about this a few weeks ago but nothing was done.
> Perhaps we could add a command which simply scans forward for the next
> run of characters that can't be saved in the specified coding system.
> The message you get in that situation could tell you about this
> command.  This would be a powerful solution, since you could easily
> find all the problems, not just the first one.  Highlighting all of
> them would also be a useful thing to do.

Do you mean a command something like this?

(defun check-coding-system-region (from to coding-system &optional max-num)
  "Check if the text after point is encodable by the specified coding system.
When called from a program, takes three arguments:
CODING-SYSTEM, FROM, and TO.  START and END are buffer positions.
Value is a list of positions of characters that are not encodable by
CODING-SYSTEM.
Optional 4th argument MAX-NUM, if non-nil, limits the length of
returned list.  By default, there's no limit."
  (interactive (list (point)
		     (point-max)
		     (read-non-nil-coding-system "Coding-system: ")
		     1))
  (check-coding-system coding-system)
  (or (and coding-system
	   (integerp (coding-system-type coding-system)))
      (error "Invalid coding system to check: %s" coding-system))
  (let ((safe-chars (coding-system-get coding-system 'safe-chars))
	(positions)
	(n 0))
    (save-excursion
      (save-restriction
	(narrow-to-region from to)
	(goto-char (point-min))
	(or max-num
	    (setq max-num (- (point-max) (point-min))))
	(if (eq safe-chars t)
	    (let ((re (string-as-multibyte "[\200-\237\240-\377]")))
	      (while (and (< n max-num) (re-search-forward re nil t))
		(setq positions (cons (1- (point)) positions)
		      n (1+ n))))
	  (while (and (< n max-num) (re-search-forward "[^\000-\177]" nil t))
	    (or (aref safe-chars (preceding-char))
		(setq positions (cons (1- (point)) positions)
		      n (1+ n)))))))
    (if (interactive-p)
	(if (not positions)
	    (message "All characters are encodable by %s" coding-system)
	  (goto-char (car positions))
	  (error "This character can't be encoded by %s" coding-system))
      (setq positions (nreverse positions)))))

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: Several serious problems

[Alan Shutko]

Kenichi Handa <handa@etl.go.jp> writes:

> It seem that this problem was already fixed.  As I also
> found one unnecessary mule-unicode-0100-24ff char, I deleted
> it.

I took a quick look, and I think these are the commits that didn't
make it into the ChangeLog:

RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/cus-start.el,v
total revisions: 55;	selected revisions: 1
description:
Add customization information for intrinsics.
----------------------------
revision 1.51
date: 2002/07/22 15:22:49;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +1 -0
(double-click-fuzz): Added.

=============================================================================

RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/vc.el,v
total revisions: 341;	selected revisions: 1
description:
;;; vc.el --- drive a version-control system from within Emacs
----------------------------
revision 1.335
date: 2002/07/22 18:52:04;  author: spiegel;  state: Exp;  lines: +7 -6
(vc-next-action-on-file): Preserve find-file-literally.

=============================================================================

RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/calendar/cal-hebrew.el,v
total revisions: 13;	selected revisions: 1
description:
----------------------------
revision 1.13
date: 2002/07/22 15:31:13;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +94 -77
(diary-omer, diary-yahrzeit, diary-rosh-hodesh, diary-parasha, diary-parasha):
Add optional MARK parameter, specifying what face or character to use
in the calendar display.  These will now return (MARK . ENTRY).

=============================================================================

RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/calendar/diary-lib.el,v
total revisions: 55;	selected revisions: 1
description:
----------------------------
revision 1.55
date: 2002/07/22 15:32:00;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +96 -89
(mark-sexp-diary-entries): Retrieve mark
from diary-sexp-entry and pass it to mark-visible-calendar-date.
(list-sexp-diary-entries): Update doc string for new docs for ....
If diary-sexp-entry returns a cons, only add the text to the diary list.
(diary-sexp-entry): Allow sexps to return a cons of the form (MARK
. STRING) to specify what face or character mark should be used in
the calendar display.
(diary-date, diary-block, diary-float, diary-anniversary)
(diary-cyclic): Add optional MARK parameter, specifying what face
or character to use in the calendar display.  These will now
return (MARK . ENTRY).

(check-calendar-holidays, diary-iso-date)
(calendar-holiday-list, diary-french-date, diary-mayan-date)
(diary-julian-date, diary-astro-day-number, diary-chinese-date)
(diary-islamic-date, list-islamic-diary-entries)
(mark-islamic-diary-entries, mark-islamic-calendar-date-pattern)
(diary-hebrew-date, diary-omer, diary-yahrzeit, diary-parasha)
(diary-rosh-hodesh, list-hebrew-diary-entries)
(mark-hebrew-diary-entries, mark-hebrew-calendar-date-pattern)
(diary-coptic-date, diary-persian-date, diary-phases-of-moon)
(diary-sunrise-sunset, diary-sabbath-candles):
Remove interactive flag from autoloads.

=============================================================================

RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/calendar/lunar.el,v
total revisions: 18;	selected revisions: 1
description:
;;; lunar.el --- calendar functions for phases of the moon.
----------------------------
revision 1.18
date: 2002/07/22 15:30:43;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +7 -4
(diary-phases-of-moon): Add optional MARK
parameter, specifying what face or character to use in the
calendar display.  These will now return (MARK . ENTRY).

=============================================================================

RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/calendar/solar.el,v
total revisions: 45;	selected revisions: 1
description:
;;; solar.el --- calendar functions for solar events.
----------------------------
revision 1.44
date: 2002/07/22 15:30:24;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +8 -4
(diary-sabbath-candles): Add optional MARK
parameter, specifying what face or character to use in the
calendar display.  These will now return (MARK . ENTRY).

=============================================================================

RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/net/browse-url.el,v
total revisions: 24;	selected revisions: 1
description:
----------------------------
revision 1.23
date: 2002/07/22 15:21:41;  author: rms;  state: Exp;  lines: +7 -3
(browse-url-lynx-input-attempts): Use defcustom.
(browse-url-lynx-input-delay): Add custom type and group.

=============================================================================




-- 
Alan Shutko <ats@acm.org> - In a variety of flavors!
I failed as a proof-reader for M & M's.

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    It was the last commit by Carsten Dominik which broke the file.

Carsten, can you figure out what action it was that broke the file?
Can you find a way to reproduce it (prefereably without checking in
the broken version!)?

We need to figure this out so we can make changes to remove the risk
users will do this.

Andreas, thanks for fixing the file.

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    I took a quick look, and I think these are the commits that didn't
    make it into the ChangeLog:

I think these are all included now, thanks.

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    Do you mean a command something like this?

    (defun check-coding-system-region (from to coding-system &optional max-num)
      "Check if the text after point is encodable by the specified coding system.
    When called from a program, takes three arguments:
    CODING-SYSTEM, FROM, and TO.  START and END are buffer positions.
    Value is a list of positions of characters that are not encodable by
    CODING-SYSTEM.
    Optional 4th argument MAX-NUM, if non-nil, limits the length of
    returned list.  By default, there's no limit."

This could do the internals of the job.  To be useful, it needs a user
interface.

How about if you modify it to make overlays to highlight those characters
instead of returning a list saying where they are?

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

      Often it's getting even worse: Emacs proposes a
    "secure" encoding and when users go for it, all looks well until you
    want to process such a file with TeX...

I am not really sure what that means--would you please explain?

Re: Several serious problems

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <200207240325.g6O3PdX04898@aztec.santafe.edu>, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>     Do you mean a command something like this?
>     (defun check-coding-system-region (from to coding-system &optional max-num)
>       "Check if the text after point is encodable by the specified coding system.
>     When called from a program, takes three arguments:
>     CODING-SYSTEM, FROM, and TO.  START and END are buffer positions.
>     Value is a list of positions of characters that are not encodable by
>     CODING-SYSTEM.
>     Optional 4th argument MAX-NUM, if non-nil, limits the length of
>     returned list.  By default, there's no limit."

> This could do the internals of the job.  To be useful, it needs a user
> interface.

Ooops, I forgot to include this sentence in the docstring.

If an unencodable character is found, move point to that character.

So, this function can be used both for an internal job and
for an interactive job (to find the next unencodable
character).

> How about if you modify it to make overlays to highlight those characters
> instead of returning a list saying where they are?

If the specified coding system is totally inappropriate for
the buffer, highlighting them will results in huge amount of
overlays and also it takes long time to finish the job.  If
we limit the number of highlighting, it may give users
incorrect information (i.e. non-highlighted characters seems
to be encodable).  So, I thought just moving point to the
next unencodable character is better.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>       Often it's getting even worse: Emacs proposes a
>     "secure" encoding and when users go for it, all looks well until you
>     want to process such a file with TeX...
>
> I am not really sure what that means--would you please explain?

We discussed the issue several times (e.g. under the subject
"lisp/ChangeLog coding system"); here is a good remark by Stephen
J. Turnbull.  Yes, that's a different from your problem, but it's cause
by the same implementation concept (enabling unification might cure most
of these problems -- thus it's very important to release an Emacs with
this feature, all released Emacs 21.x versions destroy user files at
random...):

From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
Subject: Re: lisp/ChangeLog coding system
To: "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu>
Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@is.elta.co.il>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
Date: 29 Apr 2002 20:28:55 +0900

>>>>> "Stefan" == Stefan Monnier <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:

    >> One aspect is making better guesses about desired coding
    >> systems.

    Stefan> I'm not sure what kind of improvements you're thinking
    Stefan> about.

Well, in the version (mid-January, maybe?) of GNU Emacs I have, when I
tried saving a buffer with mixed ascii, latin-1, and latin-2 in it, it
gave me an abominably long list of coding systems including mule
internal, all the -with-esc systems, and iso-2022-jp-2.  But all of
the characters used in the buffer are in ISO-8859-2, it's just Mule
making false distinctions.

At the very least, the defaults in Emacs should be to identify
identical characters (eg, those from the Latin-## subsets) and to
distinguish those where unification is controversial (the Han
ideographs).

    Stefan> non-MIME coding-systems should be in the "unlikely" list, tho.

There is no unique "the unlikely list".

For example, if I were Croatian, I probably would want the buffer
described above saved in ISO-8859-2 without being asked, but a German
would probably want to save it in UTF-8 (or maybe ISO-2022-7 if she
were an Emacs developer), or be queried, defaulting to ISO-8859-2.
And some of the "universal" coding systems (UTF-32, mule internal, all
the -with-esc systems) should probably not even be offered to most
users; they should have to ask for them by name.  But people with
special needs should be able to configure them for regular use.

And what's a "non-MIME coding system"?  AFAIK MIME has nothing to do with
coding systems except that the notation "the preferred MIME name" is a
useful convention.  But KOI8-R and all the Windows-125x sets are MIME
registered.

    Stefan> Looking at the README, I have the impression that most of
    Stefan> the functionality is already part of the Emacs CVS code
    Stefan> (mostly thanks to Dave's ucs-tables.el).  Someone should
    Stefan> try and figure out the details.

As for most functionality being in Emacs, yes, that's why I said I'd
help refactor; relative to ucs-tables.el the contribution is all UI.
My duplication[1] of ucs-tables is straightforward, not terribly
efficient code; all the meat is devoted to the question of "how do we
know which coding systems to offer the user".  Specifically I address
the issues of preferred unibyte systems and preferred universal
systems described above.


Footnotes: 
[1]  XEmacs 21.5 has built-in support for Unicode.  The UCS tables are
loaded at startup from (a local copy of) the Unicode Consortium
tables, and an API is provided to reload if desirable.  The code
predates the release of Emacs 21, and so is different from
ucs-tables.el, unfortunately.  The duplicative parts are for 21.4.

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    >       Often it's getting even worse: Emacs proposes a
    >     "secure" encoding and when users go for it, all looks well until you
    >     want to process such a file with TeX...
    >
    > I am not really sure what that means--would you please explain?

    We discussed the issue several times (e.g. under the subject
    "lisp/ChangeLog coding system"); 

I did not recognize the issue because you said "a 'secure' encoding"
and that is not a term we normally use.

    Well, in the version (mid-January, maybe?) of GNU Emacs I have, when I
    tried saving a buffer with mixed ascii, latin-1, and latin-2 in it, it
    gave me an abominably long list of coding systems including mule
    internal, all the -with-esc systems, and iso-2022-jp-2.  But all of
    the characters used in the buffer are in ISO-8859-2, it's just Mule
    making false distinctions.

The current development version of Emacs enables
unify-8859-on-encoding-mode; does that solve this problem?

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    If the specified coding system is totally inappropriate for
    the buffer, highlighting them will results in huge amount of
    overlays and also it takes long time to finish the job.

That is true.

      If
    we limit the number of highlighting, it may give users
    incorrect information (i.e. non-highlighted characters seems
    to be encodable).

It could highlight the first N runs of such characters, and display a
message saying "Many more unencodable characters found--type WHATEVER
to view them".  WHATEVER could be the same command with a prefix
argument.

What do you think of that?

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> I did not recognize the issue because you said "a 'secure' encoding"
> and that is not a term we normally use.

I thought that is were the Emacs wording.  Sorry.

> The current development version of Emacs enables
> unify-8859-on-encoding-mode; does that solve this problem?

Yes, that helps a lot.  I must go into the RC branch, please, to make
it available to the public.

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Miles Bader]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>     If we limit the number of highlighting, it may give users
>     incorrect information (i.e. non-highlighted characters seems to be
>     encodable).
> 
> It could highlight the first N runs of such characters, and display a
> message saying "Many more unencodable characters found--type WHATEVER
> to view them".  WHATEVER could be the same command with a prefix
> argument.

I'd like something similar to the way isearch works (when highlighting
non-current matches) -- just highlight what's currently displayed and
give the user a chance to jump to the next instance.  [Maybe it could
even use jit-lock-functions or something to allow free movement in the
buffer while still using optimizing display]

-Miles
-- 
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it
has to be us.  -- Jerry Garcia

Re: Several serious problems

[Francesco Potorti`]

Recently, a package called buffer-charset.el was posted to
gnu.emacs-sources.  It uses the machinery of hi-lock to work, and it's
wonderfully simple to use: you just do M-x
show-buffer-charset-characters (or use `C-x w c' is hi-lock-mode is
already active) and you're done.  You are asked what charset you want to
highlight, and if you don't know you just press TAB and choose from the
list.  The offending characters are highlighted.

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    Yes, that helps a lot.  I must go into the RC branch, please, to make
    it available to the public.

Have we already considered this possibility?  I can't remember,
but chances are we would have considered it.  It might depend
on too many other changes to be easy to put into RC.

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     Yes, that helps a lot.  I must go into the RC branch, please, to make
>     it available to the public.
>
> It might depend on too many other changes to be easy to put into RC.

Since such a patch would prevent file corruptions from happening it's
worth all effort.  IIRC, the reason not to install the unification
feature was: "it isn't tested enough".  Of course, this argument isn't
valid since we need a solution for a known problem -- users already
suffering too long.

Without the unification feature I cannot recommend Emacs 21.x to
european users having to deal with latin1 and latin9 encodings.  At the
moment, they are better served using Emacs from the CVS trunk.

Thanks for considering the issue and for your answer!

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    Recently, a package called buffer-charset.el was posted to
    gnu.emacs-sources.  It uses the machinery of hi-lock to work, and it's
    wonderfully simple to use: you just do M-x
    show-buffer-charset-characters (or use `C-x w c' is hi-lock-mode is
    already active) and you're done.  You are asked what charset you want to
    highlight, and if you don't know you just press TAB and choose from the
    list.  The offending characters are highlighted.

This might be useful for some purposes, but it is not the right
interface to be a convenient solution to this particular problem.  The
user knows that the file can't be encoded in a certain coding system
but she does not know which character sets are the problem.

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

Could you make a patch that installs in the RC branch and that works
for you?

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

> Could you make a patch that installs in the RC branch and that works
> for you?

I fear that's too complicate for me.

On 21.1 I installed the files Dave Love posted; when Dave's
enhancements were added to the CVS HEAD I switch to the CVS HEAD
version (and forgot all about the release branch).

Maybe the one who installed Dave's files on the trunck can do the same
on the release branch?

I guess it happened here to the HEAD:

    2001-12-07  Dave Love  <fx@gnu.org>

and later unification was enabled by default.

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    Maybe the one who installed Dave's files on the trunck can do the same
    on the release branch?

I don't know who that was or whether he will do this.
Anyone who would like to make this happen, I invite to work on it.

Re: Several serious problems

[Stefan Monnier]

> I cannot save the file lisp/ChangeLog.  It specifies coding system
> iso-2022-7bit, but it contains something that cannot be encoded in that
> coding system.  I don't know any way to find the text that causes the
> problem; essentially I am helpless.
> 
> Handa-san, would you please clean up whatever is wrong with that file
> so that it can save properly once again?
> 
> We MUST do something to make it easier for users to cope with such a
> situation.  We talked about this a few weeks ago but nothing was done.

Dave Love has code for it (and has posted it here).
I can't check it in, so could someone else take care of it ?


	Stefan "who pleads guilty of delaying this patch"

Re: Several serious problems

[Stefan Monnier]

> >     Yes, that helps a lot.  I must go into the RC branch, please, to make
> >     it available to the public.
> >
> > It might depend on too many other changes to be easy to put into RC.
> 
> Since such a patch would prevent file corruptions from happening it's
> worth all effort.  IIRC, the reason not to install the unification
> feature was: "it isn't tested enough".  Of course, this argument isn't
> valid since we need a solution for a known problem -- users already
> suffering too long.

ucs-tables is installed in the RC branch and will thus be part of Emacs-21.3.
It is not turned on by default, tho.  I think it's safe to turn on
unify-8859-on-encoding-mode (as is done on the trunk), but I'll let
others judge.
After all, it's supposed to be a bug-fix release and this is
not quite a bug-fix in that things work as designed (it's just
that the design doesn't do what the user wants).


	Stefan

Re: Several serious problems

[Stefan Monnier]

> Recently, a package called buffer-charset.el was posted to
> gnu.emacs-sources.  It uses the machinery of hi-lock to work, and it's
> wonderfully simple to use: you just do M-x
> show-buffer-charset-characters (or use `C-x w c' is hi-lock-mode is
> already active) and you're done.  You are asked what charset you want to
> highlight, and if you don't know you just press TAB and choose from the
> list.  The offending characters are highlighted.

Charsets are irrelevant (they're only an obscure internal implementation
detail).  Users only care about coding-systems.


	Stefan

Re: Several serious problems

[Stefan Monnier]

> If the specified coding system is totally inappropriate for
> the buffer, highlighting them will results in huge amount of
> overlays and also it takes long time to finish the job.  If

That was also my concern, but I heard that Emacs-20 did just that.


	Stefan

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

"Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:

> ucs-tables is installed in the RC branch and will thus be part of
> Emacs-21.3.

Since 2002-07-11, great!  And it is even mentioned in NEWS.

Just today I started to switch to the RC branch; now I'll use it for my
daily work.

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    ucs-tables is installed in the RC branch and will thus be part of Emacs-21.3.
    It is not turned on by default, tho.  I think it's safe to turn on
    unify-8859-on-encoding-mode (as is done on the trunk), but I'll let
    others judge.

I think we should try this.  File corruption is a bug, and if we can
fix it, we should.

Can you or someone show me precisely what change is needed?

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    > If the specified coding system is totally inappropriate for
    > the buffer, highlighting them will results in huge amount of
    > overlays and also it takes long time to finish the job.  If

    That was also my concern, but I heard that Emacs-20 did just that.

If empirically it works well enough, there's no reason to object.
Did anyone ever try this in Emacs 20 on a substantial file
with many unsuitable characters?  If not, would you like to try that
now and see how bad it was?

unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <200207250312.g6P3C9J06653@aztec.santafe.edu>, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     If the specified coding system is totally inappropriate for
>     the buffer, highlighting them will results in huge amount of
>     overlays and also it takes long time to finish the job.

> That is true.

>       If
>     we limit the number of highlighting, it may give users
>     incorrect information (i.e. non-highlighted characters seems
>     to be encodable).

> It could highlight the first N runs of such characters, and display a
> message saying "Many more unencodable characters found--type WHATEVER
> to view them".  WHATEVER could be the same command with a prefix
> argument.

I implemented that and tried on several files.  But, it
seems that such kind of feature is not that helpful.

In the case that the buffer contains many unencodable chars,
usually the specified coding system is wrong, and we must
use a different coding system.  So, it is not that
interesting to know where are the other unencodable
characters.

In the case that the buffer contains a few unencodable
chars, as it's seldam that more than one of them appear in
one window, highlighting the other unencodable chars is not
that useful.


By the way, I've just noticed that Dave has already
installed the function `unencodable-char-position' in
mule-cmds.el and used it in select-safe-coding-system.

That function resembles to check-coding-system-region on
which we are currently discussing.

But, as the docstring says, it's slow.

So, I commited these changes.

(1) Re-implementation of unencodable-char-position in C
    while adding two optional arguments.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
unencodable-char-position is a built-in function.
(unencodable-char-position START END CODING-SYSTEM &optional COUNT STRING)

Return position of first un-encodable character in a region.
START and END specfiy the region and CODING-SYSTEM specifies the
encoding to check.  Return nil if CODING-SYSTEM does encode the region.

If optional 4th argument COUNT is non-nil, it specifies at most how
many un-encodable characters to search.  In this case, the value is a
list of positions.

If optional 5th argument STRING is non-nil, it is a string to search
for un-encodable characters.  In that case, START and END are indexes
to the string.
----------------------------------------------------------------------


(2) New function `search-unencodable-char' for interactive
    use.  It utilizes `unencodable-char-position'.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
(search-unencodable-char CODING-SYSTEM)

Search forward from point for a character that is not encodable.
It asks which coding system to check.
If such a character is found, set point after that character.
Otherwise, don't move point.

When called from a program, the value is a position of the found character,
or nil if all characters are encodable.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

It may be good to bind C-x RET s to this command.

Could someone make this command more user friendly
(e.g. improving messages)?  It is also easy to modify this
funciton to highlight a few more (or windowful) unencodable
characters if you think that is surely helpful.

(3) Make select-safe-coding-system to show (at most 10)
    unencodable characters for each default coding systems
    tried.

Now, if any unencodable chars are found, one can type C-g to
cancel further saving.  As C-g doesn't hide *Warning*
buffer, one can clik on the displayed unencodable chars to
jump to the corresponding position in a buffer.


---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: Several serious problems

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <200208090744.g797irF11925@rum.cs.yale.edu>, "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:
>>  If the specified coding system is totally inappropriate for
>>  the buffer, highlighting them will results in huge amount of
>>  overlays and also it takes long time to finish the job.  If

> That was also my concern, but I heard that Emacs-20 did just that.

Emacs 20 highlighted at most 256 such characters.  And, in
Emacs 20, detecting unencodable characters was easier
because there's no coding system that can encode a part of a
charset.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: Several serious problems

[Stefan Monnier]

>     ucs-tables is installed in the RC branch and will thus be part of Emacs-21.3.
>     It is not turned on by default, tho.  I think it's safe to turn on
>     unify-8859-on-encoding-mode (as is done on the trunk), but I'll let
>     others judge.
> 
> I think we should try this.  File corruption is a bug, and if we can
> fix it, we should.
> 
> Can you or someone show me precisely what change is needed?

I think we just need to add a call like

	(load "ucs-tables")
	(unify-8859-on-encoding-mode 1)

to startup.el (and add ucs-tables.el to the list of files that are dumped).


	Stefan

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Richard Stallman]

    I implemented that and tried on several files.  But, it
    seems that such kind of feature is not that helpful.

    In the case that the buffer contains many unencodable chars,
    usually the specified coding system is wrong, and we must
    use a different coding system.  So, it is not that
    interesting to know where are the other unencodable
    characters.

    In the case that the buffer contains a few unencodable
    chars, as it's seldam that more than one of them appear in
    one window, highlighting the other unencodable chars is not
    that useful.

These seem like persuasive arguments; it sounds good.

How can I make a test case to observe it functioning?
I tried but I couldn't get encoding to "fail".

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Stefan Monnier]

>     I implemented that and tried on several files.  But, it
>     seems that such kind of feature is not that helpful.
> 
>     In the case that the buffer contains many unencodable chars,
>     usually the specified coding system is wrong, and we must
>     use a different coding system.  So, it is not that
>     interesting to know where are the other unencodable
>     characters.
> 
>     In the case that the buffer contains a few unencodable
>     chars, as it's seldam that more than one of them appear in
>     one window, highlighting the other unencodable chars is not
>     that useful.
> 
> These seem like persuasive arguments; it sounds good.
> 
> How can I make a test case to observe it functioning?
> I tried but I couldn't get encoding to "fail".

Try to save the HELLO file in utf-8.


	Stefan

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <200208121715.g7CHFrw29709@rum.cs.yale.edu>, "Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:
>>  How can I make a test case to observe it functioning?
>>  I tried but I couldn't get encoding to "fail".

> Try to save the HELLO file in utf-8.

Yes.  For instance:
	C-h h C-x RET f utf-8 RET C-x C-w ~/temp RET

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

    I think we just need to add a call like

	    (load "ucs-tables")
	    (unify-8859-on-encoding-mode 1)

    to startup.el (and add ucs-tables.el to the list of files that are dumped).

Eli, or someone else, can you try this in RC and see how it works?

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Richard Stallman]

    Yes.  For instance:
	    C-h h C-x RET f utf-8 RET C-x C-w ~/temp RET

Yes, that indeed runs the new code.

What I tried was C-h h C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-w ~/temp RET.
But it "worked"--it saved the file without complaint.

Is this a bug?

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <200208132247.g7DMlHT07283@wijiji.santafe.edu>, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>     Yes.  For instance:
> 	    C-h h C-x RET f utf-8 RET C-x C-w ~/temp RET

> Yes, that indeed runs the new code.

> What I tried was C-h h C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-w ~/temp RET.
> But it "worked"--it saved the file without complaint.

But, I think it broke some part of the file.

> Is this a bug?

No, it is an intentional behaviour.  C-x RET c _CODING_ RET
means that "I'll take all responsibility, so just accept
_CODING_, don't make any warnings!".

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Richard Stallman]

    No, it is an intentional behaviour.  C-x RET c _CODING_ RET
    means that "I'll take all responsibility, so just accept
    _CODING_, don't make any warnings!".

Thanks.  I explained this in the manual.

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     I think we just need to add a call like
>
> 	    (load "ucs-tables")
> 	    (unify-8859-on-encoding-mode 1)
>
>     to startup.el (and add ucs-tables.el to the list of files that are
>     dumped).

Excuse my ignorance: do you really mean startup.el?
>
> Eli, or someone else, can you try this in RC and see how it works?

ATM, I'm running the appended patch without problems.  I guess, it's a
know limitation that unification of characters different from the
latin-1 set, isn't supported by the RC branch?

I can unify a-umlaut from latin-2; but unification does not take place
for characterslike "LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE" (x0142).

Index: src/puresize.h
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/src/puresize.h,v
retrieving revision 1.57.14.1
diff -u -r1.57.14.1 puresize.h
*** src/puresize.h	22 Feb 2002 11:21:04 -0000	1.57.14.1
--- src/puresize.h	15 Aug 2002 02:18:49 -0000
***************
*** 42,48 ****
  #endif
  
  #ifndef BASE_PURESIZE
! #define BASE_PURESIZE (710000 + SYSTEM_PURESIZE_EXTRA + SITELOAD_PURESIZE_EXTRA)
  #endif
  
  /* Increase BASE_PURESIZE by a ratio depending on the machine's word size.  */
--- 42,48 ----
  #endif
  
  #ifndef BASE_PURESIZE
! #define BASE_PURESIZE (715000 + SYSTEM_PURESIZE_EXTRA + SITELOAD_PURESIZE_EXTRA)
  #endif
  
  /* Increase BASE_PURESIZE by a ratio depending on the machine's word size.  */
Index: lisp/loadup.el
===================================================================
RCS file: /cvsroot/emacs/emacs/lisp/loadup.el,v
retrieving revision 1.113
diff -u -r1.113 loadup.el
*** lisp/loadup.el	15 Jul 2001 16:15:34 -0000	1.113
--- lisp/loadup.el	15 Aug 2002 02:18:49 -0000
***************
*** 106,111 ****
--- 106,115 ----
  (load "language/tibetan")
  (load "language/vietnamese")
  (load "language/misc-lang")
+ (load "international/ucs-tables")
+ (unify-8859-on-encoding-mode 1)
+ ;; (ucs-unify-8859 'encode-only)
+ 
  (update-coding-systems-internal)
  
  (load "indent")

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Stefan Monnier]

> >     I think we just need to add a call like
> >
> > 	    (load "ucs-tables")
> > 	    (unify-8859-on-encoding-mode 1)
> >
> >     to startup.el (and add ucs-tables.el to the list of files that are
> >     dumped).
> 
> Excuse my ignorance: do you really mean startup.el?

Sorry, I meant loadup.el, of course.

> > Eli, or someone else, can you try this in RC and see how it works?
> 
> ATM, I'm running the appended patch without problems.  I guess, it's a
> know limitation that unification of characters different from the
> latin-1 set, isn't supported by the RC branch?

I'm not sure I understand, but I'm pretty sure it's known ;-)
If you mean that a latin-2 char is not the same as a unicode char
(e.g. for searching purposes), then you just need to use
unify-8859-on-decoding-mode as well.  This can't be the default because
it has a few undesirable side-effects
(harmless for the typical user, but annoying for people working on
some Emacs files such as ucs-*.el where we do want to be able
to talk about the difference between a latin-2 and a unicode char).

> I can unify a-umlaut from latin-2; but unification does not take place
> for characterslike "LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE" (x0142).

I don't understand what you mean "the unification does not take place".
Please just explain step by step what you did and what you expected
as if we were terminally stupid (this seems necessary when discussing
such things as unification because it has various different meanings in
the context of the current Mule code and it's too often difficult to
know which one we're talking about).


	Stefan

Re: Several serious problems

[Karl Eichwalder]

"Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:

>> I can unify a-umlaut from latin-2; but unification does not take place
>> for characterslike "LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE" (x0142).
>
> I don't understand what you mean "the unification does not take
> place".

Here is a recipe:

Starting from an Latin-1 environment enter:

    Grüß Gott!

C-x C-s
(buffer is latin-1 encoded)

Switch input encoding: C-x RET C-\ latin-2-prefix RET; enter:

    Dobr'y den

("'y" becomes one char, y with accent)

C-x C-s
(buffer stays latin-1 encoded, okay)

Enter:

    Dzie'n dobry!

("'n" becomes one char, n with accent, not available in Latin-1)

C-x C-s
Emacs proposes iso-8859-2, okay, but I would have preferred UTF-8.

C-x RET C-\ TeX RET; enter:

    \euro

("\euro becomes one char, the euro symbol, missing from latin-2)

Emacs (RC) isn't able to unify the buffer to UTF-8 (it proposes
"x-ctext" etc.); but Emacs (trunk version) can save the buffer UTF-8
encoded.  Hope this helps.

-- 
ke@suse.de (work) / keichwa@gmx.net (home):              |
http://www.suse.de/~ke/                                  |      ,__o
Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)

Re: Several serious problems

[Stefan Monnier]

> >> I can unify a-umlaut from latin-2; but unification does not take place
> >> for characterslike "LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH STROKE" (x0142).
> >
> > I don't understand what you mean "the unification does not take
> > place".
[...]
> Emacs (RC) isn't able to unify the buffer to UTF-8 (it proposes
> "x-ctext" etc.); but Emacs (trunk version) can save the buffer UTF-8
> encoded.  Hope this helps.

Indeed, the safe-charsets property of the utf-8 coding-system has not been
updated to list the extra charsets it can now encode.
In the trunk utf-8.el says:

 '((safe-charsets
    ascii
    eight-bit-control
    eight-bit-graphic
    latin-iso8859-1
    latin-iso8859-15
    latin-iso8859-14
    latin-iso8859-9
    hebrew-iso8859-8
    greek-iso8859-7
    cyrillic-iso8859-5
    latin-iso8859-4
    latin-iso8859-3
    latin-iso8859-2
    vietnamese-viscii-lower
    vietnamese-viscii-upper
    thai-tis620
    ipa
    ethiopic
    indian-is13194
    katakana-jisx0201
    chinese-sisheng
    lao
    mule-unicode-0100-24ff
    mule-unicode-2500-33ff
    mule-unicode-e000-ffff)

where in the RC branch it only says

 '((safe-charsets
    ascii
    eight-bit-control
    eight-bit-graphic
    latin-iso8859-1
    mule-unicode-0100-24ff
    mule-unicode-2500-33ff
    mule-unicode-e000-ffff)

And turning on unify-8859-on-encoding-mode doesn't update the corresponding
info either.
I think Dave or Handa would now better how to fix that (whether
unify-8859-on-encoding-mode should change the safe-charsets or whether
it should simply always include the new charsets and load ucs-tables
when needed.  And also which charsets should be added).
Thank you for pointing it out.


	Stefan

Re: Several serious problems

[Dave Love]

"Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:

> > I cannot save the file lisp/ChangeLog.  It specifies coding system
> > iso-2022-7bit, but it contains something that cannot be encoded in that
> > coding system.  I don't know any way to find the text that causes the
> > problem; essentially I am helpless.
> > 
> > Handa-san, would you please clean up whatever is wrong with that file
> > so that it can save properly once again?
> > 
> > We MUST do something to make it easier for users to cope with such a
> > situation.  We talked about this a few weeks ago but nothing was done.
> 
> Dave Love has code for it (and has posted it here).
> I can't check it in, so could someone else take care of it ?
> 
> 
> 	Stefan "who pleads guilty of delaying this patch"

I don't know what that refers to.

I suspect the problem concerns eight-bit-... characters.  If you
search for them, you have to get the multibyteness of the search
string right in a way I always have to look up.  [vc-annotate should
show you what edit was responsible.]

However, I installed code in `select-safe-coding-system' some time ago
which should point to the first offending character when selection
fails.  (As far as I remember, that was supposed to be done long ago,
but never was.)  If the development source doesn't show you the
offending character and advocate C-u C-x =, there's something wrong
with that code.

Re: Several serious problems

[Dave Love]

"Stefan Monnier" <monnier+gnu/emacs@rum.cs.yale.edu> writes:

> Indeed, the safe-charsets property of the utf-8 coding-system has not been
> updated to list the extra charsets it can now encode.

I hope whatever's been changed has been properly tested if it's on the
release branch.  Please get handa to check it if he hasn't already.

> I think Dave or Handa would now better how to fix that (whether
> unify-8859-on-encoding-mode should change the safe-charsets or whether
> it should simply always include the new charsets and load ucs-tables
> when needed.  And also which charsets should be added).

Whoever changed it should sort it out.

[Actually the stuff on the trunk should really use the encoding
translation table to set `safe-chars', which would need to be
re-registered if it changed, assuming that utf-8.el is how I left it.
However, the default does encode the listed charsets completely and
was unaffected by `unify-8859-on-encoding-mode' -- it deals with more
than 8859 anyhow.]

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Dave Love]

Kenichi Handa <handa@etl.go.jp> writes:

> I implemented that and tried on several files.  But, it
> seems that such kind of feature is not that helpful.

If I understand what's being talked about, I agree.  Normally the
first problematic character tells me what's up.

> By the way, I've just noticed that Dave has already
> installed the function `unencodable-char-position' in
> mule-cmds.el and used it in select-safe-coding-system.
> 
> That function resembles to check-coding-system-region on
> which we are currently discussing.

I'm sorry if that was wrong.  I thought it was supposed to have been
installed months ago, and I was trying to clear out the Mule changes
I've had hanging around after rms was on about it.  I thought that was
all stuff you approved of, or `obviously right'.

> But, as the docstring says, it's slow.

[It seemed fast enough for that use since it's only executed
occasionally, when there's actually a problem.  It was probably
developed on a P133.]

By the way, aborting in select-safe-coding-system can have bad effects
when you're using VC.  As far as I remember, it actually loses your
edits in some circumstance.  I haven't had time to look at the
problem.

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Kenichi Handa]

In article <rzqvg6cm2mq.fsf@albion.dl.ac.uk>, Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk> writes:
>>  By the way, I've just noticed that Dave has already
>>  installed the function `unencodable-char-position' in
>>  mule-cmds.el and used it in select-safe-coding-system.
>>  
>>  That function resembles to check-coding-system-region on
>>  which we are currently discussing.

> I'm sorry if that was wrong.  I thought it was supposed to have been
> installed months ago, and I was trying to clear out the Mule changes
> I've had hanging around after rms was on about it.  I thought that was
> all stuff you approved of, or `obviously right'.

You don't have to be sorry.  Perhaps, I've overlooked that
part when you asked about various changes long ago.

>>  But, as the docstring says, it's slow.

> [It seemed fast enough for that use since it's only executed
> occasionally, when there's actually a problem.  It was probably
> developed on a P133.]

Ah, yes.  Currently, it is used only interactively, thus the
speed is not that problem.  But, I'm thinking about using
unencodable-char-position to check if default coding systems
can encode the region or not in select-safe-coding-system
(not yet done).  I think such a change makes
select-safe-coding-system runs much faster.

> By the way, aborting in select-safe-coding-system can have bad effects
> when you're using VC.  As far as I remember, it actually loses your
> edits in some circumstance.  I haven't had time to look at the
> problem.

I noticed that too.  But, I also don't have time to fix it
for the moment.  I've never read the code of vc.

---
Ken'ichi HANDA
handa@etl.go.jp

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Dave Love]

Kenichi Handa <handa@etl.go.jp> writes:

> > By the way, aborting in select-safe-coding-system can have bad effects
> > when you're using VC.  As far as I remember, it actually loses your
> > edits in some circumstance.  I haven't had time to look at the
> > problem.
> 
> I noticed that too.  But, I also don't have time to fix it
> for the moment.  I've never read the code of vc.

Is someone going to fix this?  (I have worked on VC, but ...)

Re: unencodable-char-position [Re: Several serious problems]

[Andre Spiegel]

On Fri, 2002-08-30 at 00:52, Dave Love wrote:
> Kenichi Handa <handa@etl.go.jp> writes:
> 
> > > By the way, aborting in select-safe-coding-system can have bad effects
> > > when you're using VC.  As far as I remember, it actually loses your
> > > edits in some circumstance.  I haven't had time to look at the
> > > problem.
> > 
> > I noticed that too.  But, I also don't have time to fix it
> > for the moment.  I've never read the code of vc.
> 
> Is someone going to fix this?  (I have worked on VC, but ...)

I will look into it.  Can someone give me a more detailed description of
the circumstances when the problem arises?  Sequence of commands?