Re: libnettle/libhogweed WIP

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>
> Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2017 13:25:43 -0400
> 
> > You can have predictability if you bind coding-system-for-write to
> > whatever you want.
> 
> Why would the casual coder do that?

Casual coders won't.  And why should they?

> He'll just call the primitive, see
> that it works for his use-case and not even realize that there's some
> encoding/decoding, encouraging him along to way to overlook the big
> difference between strings of chars and strings of bytes.

I don't see any problem with that.  Perhaps you could try explaining
why you think there's a problem in this scenario.  E.g., compare:

  . a C program reads a file encoded in Latin-1 and passes the text it
    read to a function that encrypts it

and

  . an Emacs Lisp program reads a file encoded in Latin-1 into a
    buffer, then passes that buffer to a function that encrypts it

How are these two different, from the user's POV?  If they are not
different, then in the 2nd case encoding the buffer in Latin-1 before
passing the bytes to GnuTLS is TRT.

> Lars understands this very well because Gnus's code is full of such
> problems.

Gnus us full of such problems because some Gnus contributors tried to
fix problems with non-ASCII text without understanding what they are
doing and how this stuff should work, and also because Gnus messes too
much with unibyte text.  Let's "learn from past mistakes" and not do
this with these new functions.