Re: "coding: utf-8" emacs local variable in ChangeLog (?)

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sat, 3 Jan 2009 11:22:53 +0100 (CET)
> From: Mark Kettenis <mark.kettenis@xs4all.nl>
> CC: brobecker@adacore.com, gdb@sourceware.org, ludo@gnu.org
> 
> Well, I disagree.  I think it was a mistake.  UTF-8 support is not
> universally available.

Any specific examples?

> I can see why Ludovic wants to have his name spelled properly, but
> he should realize it'll look like "Ludovic Court?\203?is" to many
> people.

Not if they use Emacs.

> I think we should keep our source files as 7-bit ASCII (with the
> possible exception of the files maintained by the translation
> teams), Developers should use a transliteration for their names,
> just like all deveopers from countries in east-asia or the former
> (current?) Russian empire seem to do.

I doubt if you can get that agreed to by many people who live in the
Latin locales.  (But if you succeed, I won't mind going back to ASCII,
of course.)

Also note that leaving the encoding unspecified will almost always
produce incorrect display if someone uses non-ASCII characters, while
specifying the encoding at least does TRT in Emacs.