Re: request to revert the chnage of revno 112925

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Achim Gratz writes:
 > Paul Eggert writes:
 > > On 06/19/13 13:49, Stefan Monnier wrote:
 > >
 > >> This is not specific to Elisp, of course, it's true of most programming
 > >> languages
 > >
 > > Yes, that sounds right.  Should we make this change for all
 > > programming-language files then?  .c, .h, Makefile, etc....
 > 
 > Only when you know for certain they will be processed by UTF-8-safe
 > tools and backwards compatibility won't be an issue.

I would say only if the language definition specifies it.  Eg, Python
specifies something else (UTF-8 if the UTF-8 signature is present else
ASCII; see PEP 263).  And most sites will have tools that assume the
current locale encoding.

If Emacs wants a global setting, it should be customizable and have a
special, non-encoding value (eg, 'locale-encoding) that means "use the
current locale's encoding".  In that case, based on experience with
XEmacs and Python, I recommend 'locale-encoding, but Emacs could
specify 'utf-8 if the risk of annoying lots of users is acceptable.