Re: Please document the caching and its user options

[Ihor Radchenko]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> I needed to visit org.org, the Org manual, today, and to my surprise
> saw Emacs writing some data files into the ~/.cache/org-persist/
> directory.  What's more, Emacs popped a buffer out of the blue telling
> me that it could not safely encode the data written to (I presume)
> some of those files, and asked me to select a safe coding-system.
>
> By randomly poking here and there, I've succeeded to figure out that
> this is due to org-element's caching of data from parsing Org files.
> It seems this caching is turned on by default, but is not documented
> in the Org manual, and in particular there's nothing in the manual
> about turning off the caching.
>
> Please document the caching features of Org in the manual, including
> how to turn that off.  (I also question the wisdom of turning this on
> by default without as much as a single request for confirmation from
> the user.)

Hmm. What aspect of caching do you want us to document?
FYI, Org mode has been doing various forms of caching since
forever. Recently, we just employed a bit more regular API and
introduced one more kind of caching - parser cache. In addition to the
previously existing image cache, publishing cache, ID cache, clock
cache, etc.

> Please also make sure that the code which actually writes the data to
> the cache files makes a point of binding coding-system-for-write to a
> proper value (probably utf-8-unix), or forces
> buffer-file-coding-system of the buffer from which it writes to have
> such a safe value, to avoid annoying and unexpected prompting of the
> user to select a proper encoding.  Lisp programs that write files in
> the background cannot fail to set a proper encoding, because the call
> to select-safe-coding-system is not supposed to be triggered by Lisp
> programs unless they run as a direct result of a user-invoked command.

I believe that this particular problem has been solved in
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs/org-mode.git/commit/?id=c8f88589c
It is a part of Org 9.7.

-- 
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
Org mode contributor,
Learn more about Org mode at <https://orgmode.org/>.
Support Org development at <https://liberapay.com/org-mode>,
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