Re: TRAMP corrupting files (it's OS X's fault)

[Daniel Colascione]

On May 18, 2009, at 9:40 PM, Will Willis wrote:
> I'm going to start using rsync to see if that helps.. I wish I were
> making this up. I've had files corrupt on me as many as 3 times in one

I ran into the same problem. It's actually OS X's fault: OS X (at  
least 10.5) doesn't give Emacs any locale environment variables. Emacs  
guesses it's running under 8859-1, which has disastrous consequences  
for tramp. (If you want to test it, run locale under eshell. In the  
terminal, you see the expected locale output because Terminal.app  
*itself* sets up the correct environment before running your shell.)

One solution is to just give Emacs the right environment variables.  
I've outlined how to do that here:

http://qtmstr.livejournal.com/19155.html

(Modify the specific environment variable values according to taste.)

Another approach is to add this to your Emacs initialization:

(when (eq system-type 'darwin)
    (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8))

These fixed the corruption issue *I* was having. YMMV.

> I'd love to upgrade to Carbon Emacs 23, but I'm still on OS X
> 10.4, holding out for snow leopard.

There is no CarbonEmacs 23. The OS X support will be provided via a  
new Cocoa port which, to put it kindly, is broken. You might want to  
stick with CarbonEmacs for now.