Prefer UTF-8 over mac-roman? (was: [Karl Eichwalder <address@hidden>] charset=macintosh)

[Karl Eichwalder]

The attached message was sent to the Gnus list, but the source of the
problem is Emacs' coding system priorities.  Emacs prefers mac-roman
over utf-8 when decoding the text given below.

I noticed that PROBLEMS in Emacs 21.3 prerelease no longer says that
Unicode support is not complete (which it did in 21.2), so I assume
the Unicode support has been completed, or at least the bugs has been
fixed.

So, shouldn't UTF-8 be preferred over mac-roman in emacs 21.3?
Doesn't even Macintosh use UTF-8 now?

Perhaps it is too late for 21.3, and if so, shouldn't we at least make
this modification to HEAD?  I verified that the same problem still
applies.  (You can reproduce it easily by simply cut'n'pasting the
characters below to a new buffer in a emacs -q and try to save it, if
your mail reader decodes this mail properly.)

(Note that I run emacs in an UTF-8 locale, so this message will be
encoded as UTF-8, even though it contains the same characters as
originally reported.)

> --- Begin Message ---
>
>
>
> Subject: 
>
> charset=macintosh
>
>
>
>
> Date: 
>
> Fri, 07 Mar 2003 18:39:36 +0100
>
>
>
>
> User-agent: 
>
> Gnus/5.090016 (Oort Gnus v0.16) Emacs/21.3.50 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
>
>
>
>
> Oort Gnus v0.16
> GNU Emacs 21.3.50.1 (i686-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, Xaw3d scroll bars)
>  of 2003-03-05 on tux
> 200 gnu.franken.de InterNetNews server INN 2.3.2 ready
>
> I wrote to attached message using the TeX iput method (C-x RET c TeX RET).
> Especially I added these quotes: \ldq \rdq and then \ldots and \euro .
>
> Sending the message, Gnus choose this encoding:
>
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=macintosh
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
>
> I would have expected UTF-8 since UTF-8 is more standard than
> "macintosh"; I know you can set your preferences somehow -- but I'd
> like to see Gnus doing the right thing out of the box.
>
> > --- Begin Message ---
> >
> >
> >
> > Subject: 
> >
> > encoding test
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Date: 
> >
> > Fri, 07 Mar 2003 18:28:35 +0100
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > “quotes”
> > and more…
> > Grüß Gott.
> >
> > € 1.
> >
> > -- 
> > address@hidden (work) / address@hidden (home):              |
> > http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
> > Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
> > http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)
> >
> >
> > --- End Message ---
> -- 
> address@hidden (work) / address@hidden (home):              |
> http://www.gnu.franken.de/ke/                            |      ,__o
> Free Translation Project:                                |    _-\_<,
> http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/po/HTML/             |   (*)/'(*)
>
> --- End Message ---