XEmacs, MULE, wrong encoding for ISO-8859-1 (Latin1)

[stephen at xemacs.org]

Norbert Eisinger writes:

 > xemacs-21.5.21 has a menu "open with specified encoding"
 > that offers, in one of its submenus, ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1).
 > xemacs-21.5.27 has the same menu that offers many options
 > nubered 1...9,0,a...i but ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) does not
 > seem to be among them. Is this as it's supposed to be
 > or does it indicate some installation problem?

I'm don't know why there would be a difference between the two
versions, unless your OS vendor (SuSE, wasn't it?) made changes.
You'd have to ask them about that.  I have not done any work on the
encoding stuff personally in the last year; you should send your query
to <xemacs-beta at xemacs.org> where the people who have made changes
recently will see it.

I can tell you that ASCII doesn't exist as a separate encoding; it's
simply a subset of ISO-8859, and will be detected as the ISO-8859
variant which is appropriate for your locale.  ISO-8859-1 is treated
somewhat differently from the rest of the ISO-8859 family; it is
simply an alternative name for "binary".

 > xemacs-21.5.21 data-html.txt    status line: "MIME/LTN-9"  content looks fine
 > xemacs-21.5.27 data-html.txt    status line: "Binary"      content looks fine
 > Is "Binary" what it should say for ASCII content?

This probably means that your configuration is slightly different for
the two versions.  That could easily be true if the OS vendor supplied
a defaults.el or site-start.el file.  Try doing these tests with
"xemacs -vanilla", which prevents loading of the user init file, the
site init file, and the site defaults file.  Or you could try
installing the site files from 21.5.21 in 21.5.27.  (Use M-x
locate-library RET defaults RET to find the defaults.el file.)

 > xemacs-21.5.21 data-utf8.txt    status line: "UTF8"        content looks fine
 > xemacs-21.5.27 data-utf8.txt    status line: "Binary"      content incorrectly displayed
 > This is wrong. But is it an installation problem on our side?

We haven't yet spent a lot of effort on the default configuration,
especially since the stable version, XEmacs 21.4, is very unreliable
in a Unicode environment, and the developers generally use 21.5 and
21.4 in the same environment.  SuSE has long since moved to UTF-8 as
the default distribution-wide, and they almost surely distribute a
site-start file that configures XEmacs in that way.

So, I wouldn't call it "your installation problem", but I'm sure you
can change the default configuration to get better results.

If you can't find the site-start and defaults files from 21.5.21 or
they have bad side effects, try

M-x coding-priority-list RET

in *21.5.21* to get the detection priorities for 21.5.21.  Then use
M-: (set-coding-priority-list <list>) RET to set *21.5.27* to match.
If that works, put (set-coding priority-list <list>) in the site-start
file.  (We don't distribute one, you'll need to create it if you don't
copy from SuSE.)

HTH