


    The LysKOM Emacs Lisp Client
    -------------------------------------------
    Release notes for version 0.48+git.20231226.364902c3



    LysKOM is a project in progress at the Lysator Academic Computing
    Society at Linköping University in Sweden. For information about
    Lysator, see <URL:http://www.lysator.liu.se/>. For more information
    on LysKOM, see <URL:http://www.lysator.liu.se/lyskom/>.

    The latest version of the Emacs Lisp client for LysKOM is available
    from <URL:http://www.lysator.liu.se/lyskom/klienter/emacslisp/>.

    LysKOM is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
    under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your
    option) any later version.

    LysKOM is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
    WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
    General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with LysKOM; see the file COPYING. If not, write to Lysator,
    c/o ISY, Linköpings universitet, SE-581 83 Linköping, SWEDEN, or
    the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA
    02139, USA.

    For information on how to report bugs or request changes, see
    section 3, below.


1.  REQUIREMENTS

    You need an Emacs. The client appears to work completely with the
    following versions of Emacs:

    * XEmacs version 21.4 and newer
    * Gnu Emacs version 20.7 and newer

    The client may work with earlier versions of Emacs and XEmacs. To
    compile in Emacs 19.34 you will have to replace the included
    custom package, and if you use Gnus you may have to update that as
    well (see below).

    There are some requirements on supplemental elisp packages:

    * w3 4.0 or later (optional)

      LysKOM can use w3 for displaying HTML. At the time of writing
      this, the latest version of W3 is 4.0. It is available from
      <URL:http://www.cs.indiana.edu/elisp/w3/w3.html> and included in
      many distributions of Emacs. If w3 is not installed, LysKOM will
      be unable to display HTML.

    * calc (optional)

      LysKOM uses calc to implement the "Compute" command. If you want
      to use it you need calc. The latest version of calc, as of
      writing this, is available at <URL:ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/
      calc/calc-2.02f.tar.gz>

    * You should NOT HAVE macedit.el

      Make sure you do not have a file called macedit.el (or
      macedit.elc or macedit.el.gz) early in your load path. This file
      redefines a function that the client relies heavily on and the
      redefinition is obsolete (and has been for several years). The
      client will attempt to detect this situation and fix it by
      loading a library called edmacro. If you have macedit but not
      edmacro, you will experience problems. If you have both, there
      may be situations in which you will experience problems. You'll
      have to try and see.

      You can recognize this situation if your Emacs says something
      like this: "Key sequence < m o u s e - 2 > uses invalid prefix
      characters" when you load or compile the elisp client.

      If you encounter problems with macedit, remove it (macedit.el,
      macedit.elc and macedit.el.gz) and any references to macedit
      (you will have to search all Emacs-related files). This may
      cause some minor problems with the calc package, but those
      problems are not as serious as the havoc macedit can wreck on
      other Emacs packages. It seems that most of calc works fine
      without macedit.

    * custom (mainly affects users of Gnu Emacs 19.34)

      You need to have a recent version of the custom package
      installed. The custom.el file that is bundled with Gnu Emacs
      19.34 and older versions of Gnus will not work.

      The version that is bundled with recent versions of XEmacs, with
      Gnu Emacs 20, with recent versions of Gnus and w3 is the one you
      need.

      Custom is not longer distributed as a separate package, but it
      may be available at <URL:http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/
      custom/>. An old version is available in the elisp-client ftp
      directory at <URL:ftp://ftp.lysator.liu.se/pub/lyskom/elisp-
      client/>.

      If you have a version of Gnus installed that uses the old custom
      package, it's time to upgrade. The latest version of Gnus is
      available from <URL:http://www.gnus.org/>.


2.  Installation

    You will have received the client in a compressed tar archive or
    in a zip archive. The archive contains all the files needed to
    build the client.


2.1 How to install

    If you are on a Unix-like system (or anything that supports
    Makefiles) you can use `make' to install the client.

    1. Edit the Makefile in the distribution to reflect your
       environment. There are instructions in the Makefile.

       Optionally, use the configure script. It attempts to find
       suitable defaults for the settings in the Makefile. Simply run
       ./configure in the directory containing the client sources. 

       You may customize the output of the configure script with the
       following command-line arguments:

       --with-emacs=EMACS   Specify the name of the Emacs you want to
                            use (usually `emacs' or `xemacs'). The
                            script will attempt to locate an emacs
                            automatically.

       --with-lispdir=DIR   Specify where to install the client. You
                            will have to specify this if the script
                            fails to locate a suitable directory
                            automatically.

       --enable-language=LANG
                            Enable a language. Currently Swedish and
                            English are available. If you do not
                            explicitly enable any language, all will
                            be enabled.

       --with-default-language=LANG
                            Set the default language to LANG (Swedish
                            or English). If you do not specify a
                            default language the script will choose
                            one for you.

       The configure script is an experiment. It might work and it
       might not. If it doesn't, edit the Makefile by hand instead.

    2. Run `make envcheck' to make sure your Emacs environment is set
       up correctly. The environment check does not read your .emacs,
       so it will not find libraries that are not in the default load
       path. This means that it is possible that LysKOM will run just
       fine for you even if it complains.

    3. Edit the file lpath.el if you need to change the default load
       path for compiling (this should only happen if the custom
       package is not on your default load path).

    4. If you changed the list of languages, ran the configure script
       or are recompiling with a different Emacs version, run `make
       clean'.

    5. Run `make'. If your environment is set up correctly, LysKOM
       should be compiled. When compilation is finished, type `make
       install' to copy all the relevant files to the relevant places. 
       If you do `make install' without just doing `make', you'll
       bypass the environment check.


2.2 After installing

    After installing you can set Emacs to load LysKOM automatically.

    1. Set up autoloading by adding the following line to your .emacs
       or any other file that Emacs loads at startup (such as
       ~/.emacs, site-start.el or default.el):

            (autoload 'lyskom "lyskom" "Start LysKOM" t)

    2. If you have your own LysKOM server you may want to modify the
       variable kom-server-aliases. The best place to change it is in
       your site init file (default.el or site-start.el). For example,
       if you are running a server on kom.domain.org, you might want
       to say something like this in your init file:

            (defvar kom-server-aliases 
                    '(("kom.domain.org"     . "DomainKOM")
                      ("kom.lysator.liu.se" . "LysKOM")))

       The first server listed in kom-server-aliases will be the
       default server for new users.

    3. Restart Emacs. You should be able to use the command lyskom
       (M-x l y s k o m RET) to start the client. Enjoy!


3.  Reporting bugs and requesting new features

    Before reporting a bug, please check that it is not one of the
    known issues below. Please report bugs by posting them to the
    bugzilla at <URL:http://bugzilla.lysator.liu.se/>. If you are
    unable or unwilling to use bugzilla, you can e-mail bug reports
    and feature requests to bug-lyskom@lysator.liu.se instead.

    To evaluate your bug report we need the following information:

    o   The LysKOM version you are using. This is shown when you start
        LysKOM and is also contained in the Emacs lisp variable
        lyskom-clientversion.

    o   The symptoms of the bug. Please be as detailed as possible.
        Please do not try to make conclusions. Just give us the facts.

    o   How you triggered the bug. If you know how to reproduce it,
        please tell us. We're really good at quickly fixing bugs we
        can reproduce.

    o   How you started Emacs, what variables you have changed and
        which packages you have loaded. If possible, try to reproduce
        the bug with Emacs started with the -q command line switch.

    The command kom-bug-report may come in handy. It gives us a lot of
    information that you might not think of (such as what the internal
    data structures look like). If you post a bug report to our
    bugzilla, please make the result of kom-bug-report an *attachment*
    to your bug report.


4. Known issues

   Please read the file NEWS-0.48+git.20231226.364902c3 for more information on
   these and other issues and for information on changes in this
   version.


   Issue:  I have to re-read every FAQ even though I've read them
           before!

   Reason: Yeah, but that's the way it is. It'll only happen once.
           In order to improve FAQ handling in the latest client
           version we had to record read FAQs separately from read
           texts, and no such record exists for FAQs you read before
           upgrading. Sorry about that.

   Issue:  Cannot enter conference names containing international
           characters.

   Reason: You may be using a different character coding than the
           server is using, and conversion to the server's coding is
           not working. For example, many versions of Emacs are unable
           to convert from iso-8859-15 (latin-9) to iso-8859-1
           (latin-1) even though most characters are the same.

           Switching to the character coding used by the server by
           using set-language-environment (usually to Latin-1) will
           fix this problem. If you are unwilling to do this, you can
           try loading the ucs-tables Emacs library (a version of this
           file is available from <URL:http://www.lysator.liu.se/
           lyskom/klienter/emacslisp/>).


   Issue:  Problems displaying many normal-looking texts.

   Reason: Recent versions of some Linux distributions encourage users
           to use the latin9 language environment, which results in
           texts coded using iso-8859-15. If you do not have fonts
           suitable for displaying this character coding you may
           experience some problems with such texts. To fix this
           problem, install fonts suitable for displaying iso-8859-15
           characters. You may also be able to fix it by loading
           either the ucs-tables or the latin-unity Emacs library
           (a version of ucs-tables is available from <URL:http://www.
           lysator.liu.se/lyskom/klienter/emacslisp/> and latin-unity
           is available from the XEmacs package system).


   Issue:  I see \201 before international characters in the string
           showing what some other user is doing (e.g. L\201äser).

   Reason: The user is probably using an old version of the client in
           a new version of Emacs. You can confirm this by using the
           command kom-list-clients (Lista klienter, List clients).


   Issue:  I get the message "Key sequence < m o u s e - 2 > uses
           invalid prefix characters" when I load lyskom.elc.

   Reason: You have a file named macedit.el or macedit.elc installed.
           Remove this file.


   Issue:  Columns containing Swedish characters or characters in
           numeric representation are not aligned correctly.

   Reason: This happens in certain versions of Emacs when running
           without multi-byte character support and is due to bugs in
           Emacs. The only workaround is to either upgrade Emacs or
           enable multi-byte character support.


   Issue:  Swedish characters show up as blanks, question marks or
           numbers.

   Reason: If Swedish characters show up as blanks your font probably
           does not support them. If they show up as question marks or
           numbers your language environment does not support them or
           you are lacking the fonts to display them.

           Make sure that your language environment is set correctly
           with set-language-environment. Just setting the environment
           variable LC_CTYPE to the proper value (iso_8859_1 is
           usually correct) should be enough.

           Do not use standard-display-european to fix this problem.
