Emacs24 enable-multibyte-characters

[Uday Reddy]

The following problem seems to occur with Emacs24.

If you visit a VM folder, and then open a text file, the buffer of the text file has enable-multibyte-characters set to nil. What is VM doing to break Emacs?

This is likely to be an Emacs bug, but we need to find a way to reproduce it in Emacs without VM.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

It is likely that the text buffer is getting visited in a "literal" mode because the dos line endings don't get decoded either.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

The problem is occurring because emacs-w3m is setting something. Without it, the problem goes away.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Kazuhiro Ito (emacs-dev) informs:

I guess your problem is related with Bug#12989. Please check whether
buffer-file-type is non-nil when the problem occurs. If that is the
cause, write the below code in your ~/.emacs for workaround.

(defvar-local buffer-file-type nil)

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Using this work-around, the enable-multibyte-characters problem got fixed.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Eli Zaretskii says on emacs-dev mailing that buffer-file-type is obsolete. It is not supposed to be used any more.

Rev. 1451 removes most of the occurrences of buffer-file-type from VM. But, now the problem with enable-multibyte-characters comes back, even with Kazuhiro Ito work-around!

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Reverted the changes of rev. 1451, and put it in a separate branch buffer-file-type.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Eli Zaretskii has changed emacs-24 development branch, rev. 110960, to bring back the buffer-file-type variable.

Trying to test it causes problems. When the test-imap folder is visited, there is some corruption for the very first message displayed. vm-mime-verify-cached-layout fails, and the message display gets clobbered.

Not clear what is going on.

[Uday Reddy (reddyuday)]

Funnily, this problem arises only for the first folder visited during the Emacs session. It doesn't seem repeatable.