Re: Several serious problems

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

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

> I'm quite confused with the current status of utf-8.el,
> ucs-tables.el, utf-16.el, utf-8-subst.el, etc in HEAD and
> RC.

I've been confused too, struggling to maintain several different
versions.

> It's IMPOSSIBLE for me to figure out what are the correct
> behaviour of them.

As far as I know, what's installed in the trunk behaves correctly, but
I'm not using that code and I don't know if I'd hear about real
problems with it (as opposed to imagined problems).  It should all be
things you have said are OK or I'm sure you will think are OK, but I
may have overlooked something.  However, it could use work for CJK, in
particular; there's a fixme in utf-8, and there could be additional
interconversion tables for CJK charsets as well as a way of
customizing the character preferences in utf-8-subst.el, and probably
other things.

> I've thought that the current codes were
> the same one as what Dave had, but the above statement of
> Dave's tells that it's not.

Well, now I check, utf-8.el in the RC branch seems to be as I left it,
which is what rms (I think) told me to do.  As far as I can tell, its
safe-charsets property is correct, and I don't understand what the
complaint is about.  When I couldn't check, I assumed someone had
modified it incorrectly, but there's no sign of that in CVS.

> Could someone tell me why are they different in HEAD and RC,
> and why are they different from what Dave have written?

Most changes aren't in RC since I was only allowed to add (a version
of) ucs-tables, not changing the default behaviour, so people could
turn on (partial) character translation themselves.  It doesn't affect
utf-8 or any other ccl coding systems because they don't use the
translation table (although the useful extra coding systems in
code-pages.el aren't included either, so I think only koi,
alternativnyj and mac-roman are affected).

I think I unilaterally added some other things (a utf-8 language
environment and utf-16.el?) since they addressed somewhat misleading
entries in PROBLEMS and the arguments against the Unicode support are
either demonstrably wrong or spurious IMNSHO.

I'm afraid I've had enough of all this, and I doubt it's worth more
effort anyhow.  Especially after all the FUD about them, the Mule
additions probably won't get used much unless they're the default,
even by i18n people, unfortunately.  It's a pity your good work on
Mule 5 is rather wasted.