Re: Dired 7.9 bug: characterp [dired.el] -- UNDEFINED in Emacs 19.34

Martin Maechler (maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch)
Mon, 7 Sep 1998 14:21:36 +0200


>>>>> "Mike" == Michael Sperber [Mr Preprocessor] <sperber@Informatik.Uni-Tuebingen.De> writes:

>>>>> "Martin" == Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch> writes:
    Martin> I'm a little frustrated.

    Martin> - I downloaded efs-1.16 in order to be up-to-date and the hope
    Martin> to get an efs version that would work with GNU emacs 20.3

    Martin> - This *REQUIRED* the installation of dired-7.9.

    Mike> Ermh, yes.  It says so in the INSTALL file.
I know.  Just mentioned this as my motivation for dired-7.9..

    Martin> In dired-7.9 installation: No mentioning of GNU Emacs 20.x [ok;
    Martin> I thought 19.34 should work]

    Mike> Indeed.  There is no difference between 19.34 or higher and 20.0,
    Mike> as far as EFS and Dired are concerned.

Ok.  It would be helpful 
     if you update the INSTALL and Makefile comments for the next release.

    Martin> --> BUT: Font-lock stops working when I use dired-7.9,
    Martin> both with GNU Emacs 19.34 and 20.3.

    Mike> I'm not sure what you're implying here.  There is no
    Mike> fontification in the Dired distribution for GNU Emacs, since
    Mike> nobody has written the code yet.  (Note that fontification does
    Mike> work in XEmacs.)  Nothing in the distribution suggests that it
    Mike> should work.

I see...

On the other hand, I have [in some  .emacs equivalents]:

  (add-hook 'dired-mode-hook 	'turn-on-font-lock)

and later

  (setq dired-font-lock-keywords
      ;; Emacs 19.34 : from  /usr/local/share/emacs/19.34/lisp/dired.el
      '(;; Put directory headers in italics.
	("^  \\(/.+\\)" 1 font-lock-type-face)
	;; Put symlinks in bold italics.
	("\\([^ ]+\\) -> [^ ]+$" . font-lock-function-name-face)
	;; Put marks in bold.
	("^[^ ]" . font-lock-reference-face)
	;; Put files that are subdirectories in bold.
	("^..d.* \\([^ ]+\\)$" 1 font-lock-keyword-face)
	;;or ("^[ \t]*d.*$" . font-lock-keyword-face)
   ;;;---- These are  ADDITIONAL to  Emacs 19.34 :
	("^D.*$" . font-lock-comment-face)
	("^[ \t].*[~#][ \t]*$" . font-lock-string-face)
	))

-------
What do I have to do to make these work with  dired-7.9 {& GNU Emacs ..} ?

    Martin> EVEN WORSE: because 'characterp' is used in dired.el and is
    Martin> *NOT* in 19.34, I cannot (e.g.) copy files anymore (within
    Martin> dired) !!

    Mike> This is a known bug and will be fixed in the next release.  Just
    Mike> add the following to dired-fsf.el:

    Mike> (defalias 'characterp 'integerp)

Thanks a lot!
This fixes the problem, indeed!

Martin Maechler <maechler@stat.math.ethz.ch>	http://stat.ethz.ch/~maechler/