Subject: Re: bug#67161: 30.0.50; [PATCH] Add option `dired-filename-display-length'

From: Stefan Monnier <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2023 12:08:04 -0500

>> > However, I'm beginning to think that this is a subtle misfeature in
>> > 'concat': it should support vector of glyphs with faces, and should
>> > preserve the face information (my patch simply discards faces, which
>> > could perhaps affect string-width result).
>> Hmm...  It's hard for me to judge because I don't really understand why
>> we have "vectors of glyphs".
> They are stored in display-tables.

Yes, I know do that much :-)

>> If vectors of glyphs can express things we can't express in a
>> string, then the question is what should `concat` do in that case,
>> and if we can then ... why do we even have vectors of glyphs?
> See above.  I don't know why display-tables store vectors and not
> strings, but it was like that forever.

If everything we can do with vectors of glyphs can be done with strings
(i.e. vectors of glyphs are basically accidents of history), then it
seems it would make sense to auto-convert a vector of glyph to a string
*and* to phase out the use of vectors of glyphs.

        Stefan