Re: MULE shows gibberish; now what?

[Ilya Zakharevich <nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>]

[A complimentary Cc of this posting was sent to
Ilya Zakharevich 
<nospam-abuse@ilyaz.org>], who wrote in article <amot9n$24j8$1@agate.berkeley.edu>:
> Given the amount of bad press MULE gets (AFAIU, correctly), I never
> tried to actully use it.  Well, now I did.  And it does not work
> (21.2.2 -no-init-file).
> 
> Is there a way for a mortal to understand/fix MULE bugs?
> 
> SPECIFICS of the problem1: when asked to show cyrillic, it shows
> cyrillic indeed.  However, the shown glyphs have no relationship to
> the actual Cyrillic text (e.g., in the Hello, World example).  Do not
> have a slightest idea how to report it in more details...

It looks like pointing-fingers was not dead-on-the-target; while Emacs
is faulty, the principal blame should go to xrus-1251 and (allegedly)
Netscape.  An excerpt from

  http://www.siber.org/sib/russify/x-windows/#win-fonts

   Yes, now you can have CP-1251 fonts on your X Window system.

   We had to put them under the iso8859-5 because buggy Netscape would
   not allow these fonts to work under official CP-1251 name.

So what I see may be a very widespread situation.  Emacs can easily
detect that the font *is not* a iso8859-5 font (since iso8859-5 has
very few characters, and cp1251 has many).  At least it could have
given a warning...

Now Emacs blames: very little documentation for fontsets available
(this site has no Elisp manual, so maybe there is something there;
there *are* some mentions of fontsets in Emacs manual, but they are
close to useless; I rate them close to "this function would do what
you want").

Fontsets are not even mentioned in the concept index available through
help menu.

Ilya