Re: clean mess encrusted on to Chinese pastes cut from outside emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Eli> What is your selection-coding-system set to, and what was the
> >> chinese-big5
> 
> Eli> Why not compound-text?
> Hmm, just tried that and got  [cat -v output:]
> ^[%/2M-^IBIG5-0^BM-^IBIG5-0^BM-^AM-%| 07  5 01:51:28 CST
> where this is the               ^ japanese yen symbol
> ^[%/2M-^IBIG5-0^BM-^IBIG5-0^BM-%|^[(B 07  5 01:51:28 CST
> instead of the chinese         ^ "four" [si4] symbol
> Eli> What happens if you set selection-coding-system to no-conversion and
> Eli> look at the data which you paste from other applications?
> 
> same as above experiment.  also chinese cut from emacs pasted into
> rxvt gets messed up too.

Handa-san, does this look like the problems we already saw with
Netscape?  Should we have something in etc/PROBLEMS about this?

> >> By the way, I did (describe-variable (quote selection-coding-system))
> >> and the help page didn't mention what file it was defined in... odd.
> 
> Eli> That's because it is defined in C.
> 
> Hmmm.... we get so used to seeing the Help system giving us a link to
> a source .el, or saying "is a built-in function", so when we see none
> of these we think something is broken.  Perhaps it should mention "was
> defined in C/at emacs compile time" or something...

It can't do that currently, because some infrastructure is missing.
Maybe in some future release.

> >> maybe sometimes the user would need to set different values for
> >> sending and receiving... perhaps add such a flexibility.
> 
> Eli> You have it already: type "C-x RET X" (capital X) before cutting or
> Eli> pasting.
> 
> I was thinking of the case where the user would want to set all
> outgoing stuff different from incoming stuff, for the whole session,
> not just one command.

What's the situation where something like that would be useful?  If
it's a purely hypothetical case, I don't think we should introduce an
interactive feature for it.

> >> [I don't know how to check the value of selection-coding-system for
> >> Netscape or rxvt, all I know is there is no problem between them.]
> 
> Eli> Use no-conversion, and you will see the raw bytes they send.
> 
> Apparently they are trying to say "the following line is in BIG-5",
> but emacs doesn't need to be told that...

IIRC, this _is_ the bug, but Handa-san probably knows better.