comparison etc/PROBLEMS @ 46677:86e8d59e2e49

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46676:f0b8a25b0b7d

This file describes various problems that have been encountered
in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.

* Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.

This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released

should now succeed.

* JPEG images aren't displayed.

This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.

* Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.

This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon.  The following

the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET".  (Emacs
ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
yet.)

Multilingual text put into the Windows clipboard by other Windows
applications cannot be safely pasted into Emacs (as of v21.2).  This
is because Windows uses Unicode to represent multilingual text, but
Emacs does not yet support Unicode well enough to decode it.  This
means that Emacs can only interchange non-ASCII text with other
Windows programs if the characters are in the system codepage.
Reportedly, a partial solution is to install the Mule-UCS package and
set selection-coding-system to utf-16-le-dos.

The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
library function.

* Large file support is disabled on HP-UX.  See the comments in
src/s/hpux10.h.

* Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.

Beginning with version 21.3, Emacs refuses to link against libungif
whose version is 4.1.0 or older (the `configure' script behaves as if
libungif were not available at all).

* Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.

By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
`{' in column zero.  Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of

If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:

 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")

* Some versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
properly with Emacs 21.  These problems are fixed in W3 version
4.0pre.47.

* On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'.  If
so, you have hit a compiler bug.  Please make sure to re-configure
Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.

It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated.  If you are still using it,
please upgrade to version 2.  As a temporary workaround, remove
argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.

* Unicode characters are not unified with other Mule charsets.

As of v21.1, Emacs charsets are still not unified.  This means that
characters which belong to charsets such as Latin-2, Greek, Hebrew,
etc. and the same characters in the `mule-unicode-*' charsets are
different characters, as far as Emacs is concerned.  For example, text
which includes Unicode characters from the Latin-2 locale cannot be
encoded by Emacs with ISO 8859-2 coding system; and if you yank Greek
text from a buffer whose buffer-file-coding-system is greek-iso-8bit
into a mule-unicode-0100-24ff buffer, Emacs won't be able to save that
buffer neither as ISO 8859-7 nor as UTF-8.

To work around this, install some add-on package such as Mule-UCS.

* Problems when using Emacs with UTF-8 locales

Some systems, including recent versions of GNU/Linux, have terminals
or X11 subsystems that can be configured to provide Unicode/UTF-8
input and display.  Normally, such a system sets environment variables
such as LANG, LC_CTYPE, or LC_ALL to a string which ends with a
`.UTF-8'.  For example, a system like this in a French locale might
use `fr_FR.UTF-8' as the value of LANG.

Since Unicode support in Emacs, as of v21.1, is not yet complete (see
the previous entry in this file), UTF-8 support is not enabled by
default, even in UTF-8 locales.  Thus, some Emacs features, such as
non-ASCII keyboard input, might appear to be broken in these locales.
To solve these problems, you need to turn on some options in your
`.emacs' file.  Specifically, the following customizations should make
Emacs work correctly with UTF-8 input and text:

    (setq locale-coding-system 'utf-8)
    (set-terminal-coding-system 'utf-8)
    (set-keyboard-coding-system 'utf-8)
    (set-selection-coding-system 'utf-8)
    (prefer-coding-system 'utf-8)

* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.

This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
slots now.  If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,

46677:86e8d59e2e49

This file describes various problems that have been encountered
in compiling, installing and running GNU Emacs.


* Mule-UCS loads very slowly.

Changes to Emacs internals interact badly with Mule-UCS's `un-define'
library, which is the usual interface to Mule-UCS.  Apply the
following patch to Mule-UCS 0.84 and rebuild it.  That will help,
though loading will still be slower than in Emacs 20.  (Some
distributions, such as Debian, may already have applied such a patch.)

--- lisp/un-define.el	6 Mar 2001 22:41:38 -0000	1.30
+++ lisp/un-define.el	19 Apr 2002 18:34:26 -0000
@@ -610,13 +624,21 @@ by calling post-read-conversion and pre-
 
  (mapcar
   (lambda (x)
-    (mapcar
-     (lambda (y)
-       (mucs-define-coding-system
-	(nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
-	(nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
-       (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x))))
-     (cdr x)))
+    (if (fboundp 'register-char-codings)
+	;; Mule 5, where we don't need the eol-type specified and
+	;; register-char-codings may be very slow for these coding
+	;; system definitions.
+	(let ((y (cadr x)))
+	  (mucs-define-coding-system
+	   (car x) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
+	   (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y)))
+      (mapcar
+       (lambda (y)
+	 (mucs-define-coding-system
+	  (nth 0 y) (nth 1 y) (nth 2 y)
+	  (nth 3 y) (nth 4 y) (nth 5 y) (nth 6 y))
+	 (coding-system-put (car y) 'alias-coding-systems (list (car x)))))
+      (cdr x)))
   `((utf-8
      (utf-8-unix
       ?u "UTF-8 coding system"

Note that Emacs has native support for Unicode, roughly equivalent to
Mule-UCS's, so you may not need it.

* Building Emacs with GCC 2.9x fails in the `src' directory.

This may happen if you use a development version of GNU `cpp' from one
of the GCC snapshots between Oct 2000 and Feb 2001, or from a released

should now succeed.

* JPEG images aren't displayed.

This has been reported when Emacs is built with jpeg-6a library.
Upgrading to jpeg-6b solves the problem.  Configure checks for the
correct version, but this problem could occur if a binary built
against a shared libjpeg is run on a system with an older version.

* Building `ctags' for MS-Windows with the MinGW port of GCC fails.

This might happen due to a bug in the MinGW header assert.h, which
defines the `assert' macro with a trailing semi-colon.  The following

the Hebrew input method, type "C-x RET k iso-8859-8 RET".  (Emacs
ought to recognize the Windows language-change event and set up the
appropriate keyboard encoding automatically, but it doesn't do that
yet.)

Windows uses UTF-16 encoding to deal with multilingual text (text not
encodable in the `system codepage') in the clipboard.  To deal with
this, load the library `utf-16' and use `set-selection-coding-system'
to set the clipboard coding system to `utf-16-le-dos'.  This won't
cope with Far Eastern (`CJK') text; if necessary, install the Mule-UCS
package (see etc/MORE.STUFF), whose `utf-16-le-dos' coding system does
encode a lot of CJK characters.

The %b specifier for format-time-string does not produce abbreviated
month names with consistent widths for some locales on some versions
of Windows. This is caused by a deficiency in the underlying system
library function.

* Large file support is disabled on HP-UX.  See the comments in
src/s/hpux10.h.

* Crashes when displaying GIF images in Emacs built with version
libungif-4.1.0 are resolved by using version libungif-4.1.0b1.
Configure checks for the correct version, but this problem could occur
if a binary built against a shared libungif is run on a system with an
older version.

* Font Lock displays portions of the buffer in incorrect faces.

By far the most frequent cause of this is a parenthesis `(' or a brace
`{' in column zero.  Font Lock assumes that such a paren is outside of

If you want to stick with the Cygwin FTP client, you can work around
this problem by putting this in your `.emacs' file:

 (setq ange-ftp-ftp-program-args '("-i" "-n" "-g" "-v" "--prompt" "")

* Versions of the W3 package released before Emacs 21.1 don't run
under Emacs 21.  This fixed in W3 version 4.0pre.47.

* On AIX, if linking fails because libXbsd isn't found, check if you
are compiling with the system's `cc' and CFLAGS containing `-O5'.  If
so, you have hit a compiler bug.  Please make sure to re-configure
Emacs so that it isn't compiled with `-O5'.

It can fail to work with ldapsearch program from OpenLDAP version 1.
Version 1 of OpenLDAP is now deprecated.  If you are still using it,
please upgrade to version 2.  As a temporary workaround, remove
argument "-x" from the variable `ldap-ldapsearch-args'.

* The `oc-unicode' package doesn't work with Emacs 21.

This package tries to define more private charsets than there are free
slots now.  If the built-in Unicode/UTF-8 support is insufficient,