Re: [Emacs-diffs] master db828f6: Don't rely on defaults in decoding UTF-8 encoded Lisp files

[Paul Eggert]

Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> So you are, in effect, saying that it is incorrect to derive the
> default encodings from the locale's codeset?

Yes, for Emacs developers.  And come to think of it, for most Emacs users. 
Nowadays in my experience most non-ASCII text files use UTF-8, regardless of 
locale.  The old days of having to guess encoding from the locale are passing 
away.  This is partly due to UTF-8 being the encoding of choice for HTML and 
XML, where UTF-8 overtook the older 8-bit encodings in 2008 and now is by far 
the dominant encoding.

One way to accommodate the new reality would be to change Emacs so that by 
default the system locale does not affect Emacs's guess of a file's encoding if 
the file's initial sample is valid UTF-8.  Users could set a variable to 
re-enable the old behavior.  If we did this, we wouldn't have the error-prone 
process if sprinkling 'coding: utf-8' cookies all over the place.