[ESS-bugs] ess-mode 5.3.8; after-change-functions; RET at end of file

[Martin Maechler]

>>>>> "RoSp" == Rodney Sparapani <rsparapa at mcw.edu>
>>>>>     on Tue, 25 Nov 2008 11:03:20 -0600 writes:

    RoSp> Martin Maechler wrote:
    >> but have been outdated on emacs for quite some time,
    >> with the functionality being part of (add-hook .) with a 4-th
    >> argument 'local'
    >> 
    >> Emacs has make-local-hook with the warning about its
    >> outdated-ness, but seems to never have add-local-hook.
    >> 
    RoSp> FWIW, I don't recommend anything but the current
    RoSp> stable release of XEmacs.
    >> 
    >> Well if I start that (21.4.21) from one of our ubuntu servers,
    >> I get a warning about character conversion, and then not even
    >> the  Meta key works. 
    >> 
    RoSp> From the XEmacs PROBLEMS file:

Thank you, Rodney.

    RoSp> *** At startup I get a warning on stderr about missing charsets:

    RoSp> Warning: Missing charsets in String to FontSet conversion

    RoSp> You need to specify appropriate charsets for your locale (usually the
    RoSp> value of the LANG environment variable) in .Xresources. See
    RoSp> etc/Emacs.ad for the relevant resources (mostly menubar fonts and
    RoSp> fontsets). Do not edit this file, it's purely informative.

    RoSp> If you have no satisfactory fonts for iso-8859-1, XEmacs will crash.

We have basically stopped using iso-8859-1  and  are (almost
always) in UTF-8 unicode locales.


    RoSp> It looks like XFree86 4.x (the usual server on Linux and *BSD) has
    RoSp> some braindamage where .UTF-8 locales will always generate this
    RoSp> message, because the XFree86 (font)server doesn't know that UTF-8 will
    RoSp> use the ISO10646-1 font registry (or a Cmap or something).

well... well..  for me,  Xemacs is the only program that shows
this problem, and I am very reluctatn to change any low-level
system setup just in order to accomodate Xemacs.

    RoSp> If you are not using a .UTF-8 locale and see this warning for a
    RoSp> character set not listed in the default in Emacs.ad, please let
    RoSp> xemacs-beta at xemacs.org know about it, so we can add fonts to the
    RoSp> appropriate fontsets and stifle this warning. (Unfortunately it's
    RoSp> buried in Xlib, so we can't easily get rid of it otherwise.)

    RoSp> -----------------------------------------------------------------------

    RoSp> I see the same thing with many X applications and it is not specific to 
    RoSp> XEmacs.

    RoSp> The Meta key problem is common. I won't go into a long
    RoSp> explanation, but you usually can fix this with xmodmap rather
    RoSp> easily. The PROBLEMS file has 3 or 4 different entries that
    RoSp> might help depending on your hardware/platform/etc.

well, again.  This was no problem in earlier times, nor for any
Unix/Linux versions of GNU emacs [It *is* a problem for GNU emacs on our
Windows Server system, but then I only use that to quickly test
ESS things and never for real work].

So, why should I bother with (yet again low level) xmodmap
setting changes that I have already carefully crafted for my
environment of using a US keyboard but still wanting swift and easy entering of
German umlauts etc.

    >> If I use the older (x.y.17) from our departmental installation,
    >> the Meta key works neither and I get three warnings about
    >> character/font conversions, and "pink on white" (!!)
    >> foreground-background combination, which is also pretty
    >> off-putting.
    >> 
    >> 
    RoSp> Do you use .Xdefaults for Emacs? I believe XEmacs will read these.
    RoSp> If you want examples of useful stuff to put in there, see Help ->
    RoSp> Samples -> Xresources in the menubar.

Yes, we still use .Xdefaults even though they are now completely
outdated by the modern desktop (GNOME, KDE) "preferences
settings".
So, yes, you are probably right that the colors could be
modified there.

    >> Both is with using  'xemacs -q'.

      RoSp> However, I don't think you will have any
      RoSp> trouble with relatively recent versions like 21.4.17 and higher
      RoSp> (February 2005 and forward). Sun distributes 21.4.12 (January 2003)
      RoSp> with it's developer tools so it commonly seen in the wild, but it
      RoSp> suffers from the revert-buffer not updating Local Variables bug
      RoSp> <http://ess.r-project.org/Manual/ess.html#fn-1>. Other than that,
      RoSp> it works fine and many people here are using it to my chagrin.

    >> I don't want to spend more time with Xemacs for the time being
    >> and would be very grateful if you could check the current (svn!)
    >> version of ESS with some versions of Xemacs.
    >> 
    >> Martin

    RoSp> I don't blame you. I don't even have GNU Emacs installed on our new
    RoSp> system since it leads to alot of confusion, e.g. is this AucTeX for
    RoSp> Emacs or XEmacs, etc. However, I am sad to say that
    RoSp> this is a really bad time and I'm not going to be able to work on
    RoSp> this much. We are going into the Thanksgiving break and, more
    RoSp> importantly, it is deer season in Wisconsin where schools and
    RoSp> businesses close down even though it is not required by law.
    RoSp> Sorry about that. I should have some time next week.

Ok, I understand.  Real life must take precedence over "hacking".

OTOH, I did have to retract 5.3.9 because of that bug, and I
really would want to replace it by 5.3.10  by tomorrow if
possible.
 
Should I ask for volunteer Xemacs testers on ESS-help ?
Martin