Re: x-symbol package dangerous in multibyte environment
Janusz S. Bień wrote:
On Thu, 31 Oct 2002 Steve Dunham <dunham@cse.msu.edu> wrote:
Janusz S. Bień wrote:
Thanks for quick answer.
I can't reproduce the problem with the version of x-symbol in
unstable/testing (4.43-4).
I am afraid you missed my point. The site-wide installation of
x-symbol forces innocent users :-) to change the way how they process
their perfectly legal TeX files. They have either edit them to provide
x-symbol specific local variables or to use specific locale even if
they regularly use a different one.
In my opinion this is unacceptable. If there is no quick way out,
x-symbol after installation should be disabled by default, and
interested users should enable it locally, without affecting others.
I'll make it a debconf option.
I tried it with emacs21 and LANG=pl_PL.
Please try it without changing locale.
When testing in a slightly different environment, I get different
behaviour for the test:
Ahh, I couldn't reproduce it because I was using C-x C-w to
save to a different file name, and it doesn't garble the file in
that case. (It does change the buffer to latin-1 if you don't have
the locale set - I don't know if that is an emacs or x-symbol
problem.) If I use C-x C-s and don't have the Locale set, I can
reproduce the bug.
I filed a bug report and BCC'd it to you, so you will know how
to file them in the future (it's pretty simple).
> If you open the enclosed `alfabet1.tex' file and save it as
> `alfabet2.tex', then you get rubbish in the second file.
Open `alfabet1.tex', do some minor editing, e.g. add a space on the
end of line (or simulate this by C-u M-~) and save the file. You will
get rubbish without any warning. To be precise, the file content will
be interpreted as Latin-1 and stored in some ISO-2022 coding system
using a lot of escape sequences. However, due to the local variable,
it will be visited as Latin-2, i.e. without the proper interpretation
of the escape sequences.
In other words, if a Debian site administrator installes x-symbol
without warning all the users, some of them can waste a lot of their
work before they realize that the files are not saved correctly (and
most of them will don't know how to recover - forcing ctex coding
system when visiting garbled files seems to be the first step to go).
This will be fixed in the next release of the Debian package. (There
will be a debconf option to specify if it should be enabled globally,
similar to what preview-latex does.)
Steve
dunham@cse.msu.edu
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