Re: TRAMP copies binary files incorrectly

[Chris Moore]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

> I just tried this, and I cannot reproduce the problem with the
> current CVS: I get an exact replica of the original file on my local
> machine.

I found what was causing the problem:

I didn't have uudecode installed on the local machine, so TRAMP was
using Emacs' Lisp version of uudecode, and using Emacs' write-region
to save the results to a file.

tramp.el is careful to bind coding-system-for-write to 'binary when
writing the region:
                     (let ((coding-system-for-write 'binary))
                       (funcall loc-dec (point-min) (point-max))
                       (write-region (point-min) (point-max) tmpfil))

but unfortunately that's not enough to stop write-region playing with
multi-byte characters - and that's probably the real bug.

The " *tramp tmp*" buffer has coding-system-for-write set to 'binary,
but also has enable-multibyte-characters set to t.  write-region uses
fileio.c's e_write(), and that does the following, copying the
buffer's value of enable-multibyte-characters into the coding system,
before using it to write the region:

        coding->src_multibyte
          = !NILP (current_buffer->enable_multibyte_characters);

My question is: should having the coding-system-for-write set to
'binary be enough to stop any multi-byte processing being done on
write, regardless of the value of enable-multibyte-characters?  And if
so, shouldn't we tell e_write() about it?

This patch demonstrates that it is enable-multibyte-characters which
causes the problem, but I suspect that the bug really needs fixing in
the C code:

--- lisp/net/tramp.el   2007-01-11 01:19:46.000000000 +0100
+++ lisp/net/new/tramp.el       2007-01-11 01:18:59.000000000 +0100
@@ -3827,6 +3827,7 @@
                     ;; line from the output here.  Go to point-max,
                     ;; search backward for tramp_exit_status, delete
                     ;; between point and point-max if found.
+                    (set-buffer-multibyte nil)
                     (let ((coding-system-for-write 'binary))
                       (funcall loc-dec (point-min) (point-max))
                       (write-region (point-min) (point-max) tmpfil))