Cyrillic vs UTF-8

[Simon Josefsson]

$ emacs -q --no-site-file
C-h H   (view HELLO file)
Mark the line with Russian text with mouse
q   (quit HELLO file)
C-x C-f ff RET   (open a new file)
C-y              (yank the text, looks fine in the new buffer)
C-x C-s          (save file, it complains that iso-latin-1 cannot
                  encode the data, and suggests utf-8)
RET              (go with the default utf-8)
C-x C-k          (kill buffer)
C-x C-f ff RET   (open file again)
                 (emacs fail to recognize it as utf-8 and displays gibberish)
C-x C-k          (kill buffer)
C-x RET c utf-8 C-x C-f ff RET (open fail as utf-8)
                 (emacs recognize the file as utf-8 but display empty boxes)

Pressing C-u C-x = on the first empty box (first non-ascii character)
shows:

  character: Р (01212100, 332864, 0x51440)
    charset: mule-unicode-0100-24ff
             (Unicode characters of the range U+0100..U+24FF.)
 code point: 40 64
     syntax: w  which means: word
   category: y:Cyrillic  
buffer code: 0x9C 0xF4 0xA8 0xC0
  file code: 0xD0 0xA0 (encoded by coding system mule-utf-8-unix)
    Unicode: 0420
       font: -Adobe-Courier-Medium-R-Normal--17-120-100-100-M-100-ISO10646-1

I think there are two problems.  Opening the file the first time
should guess it is a utf-8 file.  Secondly, emacs should be able to
find a font that contains the characters -- I have all font packages
from Debian installed.  The following works fine:

-Misc-Fixed-Medium-R-Normal--18-120-100-100-C-90-ISO10646-1

In GNU Emacs 21.3.50.12 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
 of 2003-04-25 on latte.josefsson.org
configured using `configure '--with-gtk''

Important settings:
  value of $LC_ALL: nil
  value of $LC_COLLATE: nil
  value of $LC_CTYPE: nil
  value of $LC_MESSAGES: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $LC_MONETARY: nil
  value of $LC_NUMERIC: nil
  value of $LC_TIME: en_US.UTF-8
  value of $LANG: nil
  locale-coding-system: nil
  default-enable-multibyte-characters: t

Recent input:
M-x r e p o r <tab> <return>

Recent messages:
(emacs -q)
Loading tool-bar...done
Loading image...done
Loading tooltip...done
For information about the GNU Project and its goals, type C-h C-p.
Loading emacsbug...done