23.0.60; File corruption when Gnus reads .overview

[Stephen Berman]

Some change between 2008-02-21 and 2008-03-03 has the effect that, when
Gnus reads an .overview file containing certain non-ascii characters,
that file immediately gets corrupted.  With my current Emacs build
(which is really from 2008-03-03; the date of 2008-03-06 given below is
because I ran `make TAGS' then) I can visit the file outside of Gnus
without problem, and in my build from 2008-02-21 reading it with Gnus
also does not cause corruption.  The file in question is my Gnus
.overview file of the gmane.emacs.help newsgroup.  I have attached an
exerpt of this file (the whole file is 14 MB large) containing the first
1000 entries, which is enough to induce the corruption.  (When Gnus
reads the whole file, the serious corruption begins at entry 586, but
when I substituted the attached excerpt, I found the serious corruption
starting at entry 292.  By "serious" I mean a huge sequence of
non-printing characters; some earlier entries show brief corrupt
sequences.)  To reproduce, I copy the attached file as .overview to the
following location (the News directory is by default in ~, but I keep it
in ~/.emacs.d): News/agent/nntp/news.gmane.org/gmane/emacs/help.  Then I
start Gnus with gnus-unplugged (I use the Gnus Agent), go online with `J
j', and open the gmane.emacs.help group.  At this point the corruption
is already there, even if I quit the group and Gnus without saving.  I
don't know enough about Gnus to know whether these instructions plus the
attached file are enough for others to reproduce the corruption.  If
more information or additional Gnus files are needed, I will gladly
provide them.

Steve Berman

In GNU Emacs 23.0.60.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 2.12.0)
 of 2008-03-06 on escher
Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.70200000
configured using `configure  '--enable-font-backend''

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

Major mode: Change Log

Minor modes in effect:
  isearch-buffers-minor-mode: t
  tabbar-mwheel-mode: t
  tabbar-mode: t
  recentf-mode: t
  display-time-mode: t
  show-paren-mode: t
  tooltip-mode: t
  tool-bar-mode: t
  mouse-wheel-mode: t
  menu-bar-mode: t
  file-name-shadow-mode: t
  global-font-lock-mode: t
  font-lock-mode: t
  global-auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-composition-mode: t
  auto-compression-mode: t
  temp-buffer-resize-mode: t
  column-number-mode: t
  line-number-mode: t

help-overview
Description: Gnus .overview