Re: save-buffer in tar-mode

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

> I think it would work, and it might be a good idea.
> However, something about it seems not quite right.
> I have the feeling that the really right thing to do would
> be different in some detail.

Completely agreed, which is why I haven't hacked this feature.
I feel like it's likely to get into nasty issues with markers and internal
vars (like display vars and such) that would need to be
updated/invalidated.

The problem is:

- start with a big hunk of data in buffer A
- call tar-mode
- end with small TOC in buffer A and the big hunk of data in buffer B

Maybe a function `buffer-move' which does like `buffer-insert' except that
it can only insert into an empty buffer and that it deletes the text from
the source buffer.

But in any case, maybe this is just very silly and a plain copy of 25MB
would work just as well.  After all when we have to move the gap to update
this tar buffer, we also have to move a significant fraction of
those 25MB, so it won't make things much worse than they already are.


        Stefan