bug#34909: 26.1; Error refreshing packages under language environment

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

> (I also don't understand why you say the buffer must be unibyte: if
> the coding-systems for each operation are set correctly, there should
> be no difference at all, not nowadays.  IME, using unibyte buffers is
> just the easy way out when one doesn't want to mess with the
> coding-systems stuff.)

Of course, when dealing with data we only transfer from network to file,
using unibyte (or more specifically: without decoding nor encoding) is
simply more efficient, but it's also safer: Encoding using utf-8 is only
safe if the decoding was itself done using the same coding system and
I don't see where we do that, so it's not clear that it's always decoded
with utf-8.

> Feel free to work on package--with-response-buffer in this direction.
> Debugging this was a small nightmare, due to the use of macros and
> async retrieval with callbacks, so I felt lucky when I finally found
> the problematic code and understood why it worked in the English
> language environment.

"nightmare" is very appropriate, indeed.


        Stefan