status report of tar-summarize-buffer and/or set-buffer-multibyte?

[Roland Winkler <roland.winkler@physik.uni-erlangen.de>]

In GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (i386-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
 of 2002-04-09 on tfkp12
configured using `configure  --prefix=/nfs/common --libexecdir=/nfs/common/lib --bindir=/nfs/common/lib/emacs/21.2/bin/i686-Linux --mandir=/nfs/common/share/man --infodir=/nfs/common/share/info --with-gcc --with-pop --with-x --with-x-toolkit=athena i386-pc-linux'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: POSIX
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: nil
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: nil
  value of $LANG: en_US
  locale-coding-system: iso-latin-1
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: nil

Please describe exactly what actions triggered the bug
and the precise symptoms of the bug:


Usually tar mode is a nice tool for viewing tar files. But today,
when I tried to view a moderately-sized tar file (25 Mb) it seemed
to me that emacs would hang indefinitely. After a while, I figured
out that the culprit was the line

  (set-buffer-multibyte t)

in tar-summarize-buffer. On my computer this function needed about
two minutes to do its job. Would it make sense here to provide a
status report so that impatient people like me are not fooled to
believe emacs hangs indefintely? Is this possible??

The point is that tar-mode issues the messages "Parsing tar file..."
and "Parsing tar file...done" which gives the impression that the
parsing was the biggest part to be done when a tar file is loaded.
Apparently, this is not always correct.

Roland


PS: Let me know if you are interested in an example file. I don't
want to send 25 Mb of junk to everybody who is reading this.