emacs misbehaves without --unibyte

[Paul Stoeber]

In GNU Emacs 21.2.1 (powerpc-unknown-linux-gnu)
 of 2002-05-26 on xyz
configured using `configure  --prefix=/e --without-x'
Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  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: C
  locale-coding-system: nil
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Built without modification from
MD5:f4b58e5c2d923fc92495e0c2f167c5db 
URL:ftp://ftp.cs.tu-berlin.de/pub/gnu/emacs/emacs-21.2.tar.gz


In bash in my home directory:

q@xyz:~$ echo gr340ve > $'gr\340ve'
q@xyz:~$ /e/bin/emacs --eval '(dired "~/")'

Now in dired, I go to the file `gr?ve' and type RET.  The message line
says "File no longer exists; type `g' to update Dired buffer".  (I think
it should have opened the file.)   C-x C-c.

q@xyz:~$ rm gr?ve
q@xyz:~$ mkdir -p $'gr\340ve'/x/y/z
q@xyz:~$ /e/bin/emacs --eval '(dired "~/")'

Now in dired, I go to the directory `gr?ve' and type RET.  The message line
says "File no longer exists; type `g' to update Dired buffer".  (I think
it should have changed into the directory.  Now I can't browse the directory
tree below `gr?ve'.  This is a grave limitation.)   C-x C-c.

q@xyz:~$ rm -rf gr?ve
q@xyz:~$ echo gr340ve > $'gr\340ve'
q@xyz:~$ /e/bin/emacs --eval '(dired "~/")'

Now in dired, I go to the file `gr?ve' and type the `a' key.  There's an
_empty_ buffer with the name `gr?ve' in its status line.  (The file
$'gr\340ve' contains the string "gr340ve", but due to the first
experiment I'm not surprised.)  X X X RET C-x C-s C-x C-c.

q@xyz:~$ ls gr* | cat -vet
grM-^AM-`ve$
grM-`ve$
q@xyz:~$ cat $'gr\201\340ve'
XXX
q@xyz:~$ 

Is that supposed to happen?

Everything is fine if I run emacs as `/e/bin/emacs --unibyte'.  If multibyte
support is so intrusive, shouldn't --unibyte be the default?  I think all
sites that have some 8-bit filenames will need it.  If you don't decide to make
it the default, maybe it should be mentioned in `(efaq) Bugs and problems'.

Last but not least:

q@xyz:~$ rm gr?ve gr??ve
q@xyz:~$ echo gr200340ve > $'gr\200\340ve'  # that's two-oh-oh, not 201
q@xyz:~$ echo gr340ve > $'gr\340ve'
q@xyz:~$ /e/bin/emacs --eval '(dired "~/")'

The last two lines of an otherwise cleared screen:

Fatal error (11).Segmentation fault
q@xyz:~$

Using --unibyte fixes this too.