Re: [AUCTeX-devel] Re: [Bug-AUCTeX] 11.83; encoding problems in RefTeX's .rel files

[David Kastrup]

Frank Küster <address@hidden> writes:

> Ralf Angeli <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>>> **********************
>>> ;; RefTeX parse info file
>>> ;; File: /home/frank/Privat/Krawattenknoten.tex
>>> ;; User: frank (Frank Küster)
>>>
> [...]
>> Is the above the buffer content when you are being asked for the
>> coding system or is it the resulting file content after you chose a
>> coding system and saved the buffer?
>
> When (and probably before) I am being asked.  And also after saving in
> iso-latin-1, it doesn't change.
>
> reftex.el contains:
>
>               (insert (format ";; RefTeX parse info file\n"))
>               (insert (format ";; File: %s\n" master))
>               (insert (format ";; User: %s (%s)\n\n"
>                               (user-login-name) (user-full-name)))
>
> ,----[ C-h v user-full-name RET ]
> | user-full-name is a variable defined in `C source code'.
> | Its value is 
> | "Frank K\303\274ster"
> | 
> | 
> | Documentation:
> | The full name of the user logged in.
> | 
> | You can customize this variable.
> `----
>
> So this looks like a bug in emacs.  By the way, that's the same in
> Debian's emacs_21.4.3 and in

I don't see that this is a bug of Emacs.  Emacs uses getpwent to get
the respective /etc/passwd entry.  This returns a byte string.  The
manual pages don't specify an encoding.  And there is really no such
thing as a "system locale" independent from an individual user.

So I don't see much that Emacs can do here, except possibly assuming
that its default locale matches getpwent.  Given that people often use
latin1 for their (LaTeX) text processing, that seems audacious at
best.

> /etc/passwd is in utf-8,

Says who?

> and I must say that although Debian etch claims to be utf-8-ready,
> most of my X terminals aren't able to "cat /etc/passwd" properly;
> konsole (kde terminal) can do it only after I manually switch the
> encoding.

My Gnome terminal gets along fine (it does not do character
compositing or right-to-left languages AFAICT, though).

-- 
David Kastrup, Kriemhildstr. 15, 44793 Bochum