Re: status of utf-8.el, etc [Re: Several serious problems]

[Dave Love]

Kenichi Handa <address@hidden> writes:

> >>  (1-2) utf-8-translate-cjk can never be turned off once
> >>  turned on.
> 
> > I don't think it should be toggled;
> 
> Then, why do we have this now?
>       (defcustom utf-translate-cjk nil ...)

It's there so that people can find the facility and have the option
not to load it, since it involves quite large tables.  I don't know
how much the extra heap space is worth worrying about, but the tables
should probably be made bigger anyhow.  (This presumably wouldn't be
important if it was preloaded, with the tables in purespace, but I
think you want to be able to customize the charsets used, so they
can't be frozen.)

> As far as it's a customizalbe variable, one should be able
> to turn it off.

[I can think of examples where it probably only makes sense to
customize things per session.]

In this case I think I either forgot or ran out of enthusiasm, but I
don't think it's something you'd want to turn off after loading it.

> One may or may not want select-safe-coding-system to decide
> utf-8 as the default for a buffer that contains CJK charsets
> and etc.  I'm not sure.

That should be taken care of by coding priorities, surely, just as
with Mule-UCS.

> One reason of zero interest is perhaps that such a people is
> already using Mule-UCS.

Or that they've been told doing it in Emacs 21 is impossible.  I'm
sure people have complained about lack of built-in support, but if
they aren't willing to work on it, I guess they aren't very justified,
as with iso-8859 character translation.  The basic Emacs 21 support
actually has advantages over Mule-UCS, such as not clobbering
unrepresentable characters and being something we can understand; I
thought that would make it attractive anyway.

> > Some of those names don't seem right.  For instance,
> > ucs-mule-to-mule-unicode isn't only used by utf-8/16 as far as I
> > remember.
> 
> ???  So, it doesn't contain "utf".

I thought you re-named it to something that did contain "utf".