Several serious problems

[Richard Stallman]

I cannot save the file lisp/ChangeLog.  It specifies coding system
iso-2022-7bit, but it contains something that cannot be encoded in that
coding system.  I don't know any way to find the text that causes the
problem; essentially I am helpless.

Handa-san, would you please clean up whatever is wrong with that file
so that it can save properly once again?

We MUST do something to make it easier for users to cope with such a
situation.  We talked about this a few weeks ago but nothing was done.
Perhaps we could add a command which simply scans forward for the next
run of characters that can't be saved in the specified coding system.
The message you get in that situation could tell you about this
command.  This would be a powerful solution, since you could easily
find all the problems, not just the first one.  Highlighting all of
them would also be a useful thing to do.

This problem prevented me from commiting changes to the file from
Emacs.  I was able to edit and save the file using
find-file-literally, but when I tried to commit the changes, C-x v v
tried to revisit the file non-literally.  I think that is a serious
bug in VC.  VC should cope with visiting a file literally.
Andre, would you please fix that?

So I tried typing `cd lisp; cvs commit ChangeLog'.  It put me into
vi to ask me to edit a log message.  Damn!  I killed it, set EDITOR
and VISUAL to `emacs', and tried again.  This time it gave me Emacs
to edit with.  I deleted all the text, saved the log message file,
and exited Emacs.  cvs obnoxiously complained about the empty log
message and asked me what to do.  I typed `c RET' meaning "continue".

At that point it never came back to me.  Now the emacs/lisp directory
is locked and nobody can do anything in it any more.

Savannah people, would you please delete the lock?