Re: save-buffer in tar-mode

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> To avoid changing enable-multibyte-characters, I have
> another idea.

While we're throwing around ideas, I'd mention the one I had already
presented in the past: allow switching the buffer's text between
two buffers.
The idea is:
find-file loads the tar file's content into buffer A.

tar-mode is called which needs to show in buffer A the TOC (in multibyte
since it's made of chars).  Currently it does this by prepending the TOC and
using narrowing to hide the actual tar data (which really wants to be in
unibyte since it's made of bytes).  What tar-mode would ideally want to do
is copy the tar data to auxiliary buffer B so buffer A could be in multibyte
and buffer A in unibyte, but copying 25MB of tar data is a bit costly, so
instead we could offer a primitive that swaps the buffer_text of
two buffers.  Or something along these lines.


        Stefan