Re: Improvements to `(emacs)File Variables'

[Richard Stallman]

    As I've posted before, I think "unibyte" strings/buffers should be only
    an optimization, and should have an explicit (8-bit) encoding associated
    with them, so that any conversions to/from multibyte can automatically
    do the correct thing; one of these encoding could of course be "binary",
    which maybe would allow the historical usage of unibyte to be preserved.

It might be possible to make this work, but the current handling is
not broken, so I don't want to make such a big change in it.

There are more important parts of Emacs to improve, even after the
next release.