Re: Emacs Lisp's future

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2014 23:22:59 -0400
> From: Richard Stallman <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden, address@hidden, address@hidden,
>       address@hidden
> 
>     >     Originally, Emacs would complain that Latin-1 cannot be used, and
>     >     asked the user to select a different encoding.
>     > 
>     > That is about Latin-1.  What did Emacs do, at that time, with UTF-8?
> 
>     The situation I described is with text encodable by UTF-8, but not by
>     Latin-1.  So it has no analogue when UTF-8 is used to begin with.
> 
> It looks like that past case isn't directly pertinent to this issue,
> then.

I think it _is_ pertinent, because it demonstrates how intolerable
Emacs users are to prompts that appear where by their (users')
standards Emacs should simply silently DTRT (for some definition of
"Right").

>     What will Emacs do, under this proposal, if the user is asked whether
>     to keep the original raw bytes and answers NO?
> 
> Abort the operation, I suppose.

Good luck selling this to our users.

>     Our experience with such prompts is that they are perceived as
>     annoyances, no matter whether they happen at read or at write time.
> 
> Maybe so, but how big of an annoyance depends on how often it happens.

Our experience is that it happens "too often".

> Those who are arguing for doing something to avoid propagating raw
> bytes might want to implement an optional feature for asking for
> confirmation before saving UTF-8 with raw bytes.  Then people could
> try enabling that feature and we would see how often we get asked to
> confirm.

Fine by me.