On 2018-05-30T09:17:22-0600, Theo de Raadt wrote: > This approach seems misguided. Let me tell a story. > > More than two decades ago, I made a fork of mg which was 100% byte > clean. Unfortunately I lost the source code of that change. mg's data > buffers are a linked list of lines, with a \n implied by the end of each > string. 0 bytes are unsupported. Supporting multibyte risks a string > merger getting confused by these problems and creating junk. My fork > changed mg to embed \n and \0 in the strings, and have the display code > understand that. All buffer-search functionalities also learned of this > change. The change had to be made quite incrementally and carefully, > but I recall the end result deleted far more code than it added. mg became > 100% 8-bit clean, I could edit binaries with it. > > I think trying to shoehorn utf8 in before mg is 8-bit clean is a recipe > for disaster. There are too many functions (imagine search-replace) > which already have nasty special cases for \n, and now will need nasty > special cases for utf8 and I don't think this will work out nice.
Fair enough. I am decidely not up for reworking all of mg. It seems better that this patch, as it is, remain off to the side in case someone wants to use it themselves. -- S. Gilles
