Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Thomas Fitzsimmons <fitzsim@fitzsim.org>
>> Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2016 10:58:44 -0400
>> Cc: Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>, emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> 
>> My plan is to replicate that without the soap-client patch, and try to
>> fix it a different way, in Debbugs.  From that thread, I think this will
>> show it:
>> 
>> (async-get (async-start
>>             `(lambda ()
>>                (load ,(locate-library "debbugs"))
>>                (debbugs-get-status 22285))))
>> 
>> I'll work on this hopefully this evening unless you beat me to it.
>
> Thanks.  But it would be good to discuss what you think should be done
> in debbugs.el, before you actually do that.  The important part is to
> figure out how can debbugs.el know whether a byte stream is a text
> string.

With the soap-client patch reverted, this debbugs.el patch fixes the
above test case, producing a correct multibyte string for originator.

This is just one example, obviously.  The new function should be applied
to all values returned by the Debbugs server that may contain multibyte
UTF-8 characters.  I'll leave this part to Michael.

Also, there's still something not quite right about async, for strings
that don't contain extended characters:

(multibyte-string-p (cdr (assq 'severity (car (async-get (async-start
            `(lambda ()
               (load ,(locate-library "debbugs"))
               (debbugs-get-status 22285))))))))
=> nil

(multibyte-string-p (cdr (assq 'severity (car (debbugs-get-status 22285)))))
=> t

but this looks like a side effect of async.

I'll wait to revert the soap-client patch on master and emacs-25 until
Debbugs has a new release to fix this, to avoid temporarily re-breaking
Debbugs.  (However, I'd really like to get this done before Emacs 25.1
so that it doesn't go out with an incompatible soap-client API.)

Thomas