Re: x-symbol package dangerous in multibyte environment
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 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:
> > If you open the enclosed `alfabet1.tex' file and save it as
> > `alfabet2.tex', then you get rubbish in the second file.
The new buffer is interpreted and displayed as coded in Latin-1 and
GNU Emacs asks for choosing a coding system. This is definitely better
but still not acceptable.
The following test shows better the danger of installing x-symbol the
way it is now:
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).
> The saved file is
> identical to the loaded one. Janusz, can you test it? The
> package is at:
>
> http://http.us.debian.org/debian/pool/main/x/x-symbol/x-symbol_4.43-4_all.deb
The new version does not address the problem. Moreover, it produces a
lot of warnings during installation. Are they stored somewhere or one
can only watch them on the screen?
Best regards
Janusz
--
,
dr hab. Janusz S. Bien, prof. UW
Prof. Janusz S. Bien, Warsaw Uniwersity
http://www.orient.uw.edu.pl/~jsbien/
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