Re: Setting file-name/process coding system from LANG

[Miles Bader <miles@lsi.nec.co.jp>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:
>     It seems to me that LANG should be enough to force filenames and process
>     I/O coding to use utf-8, regardless of the Emacs language-environment
>     setting 
>
> Does LANG have this effect on other programs?

In general yes, it seems too.  Most importantly, the LANG setting
determines how sub-programs invoked from Emacs encode their error messages,
so Emacs should be using the same encoding for process I/O.

> LANG itself should not control anything in Emacs directly, but maybe
> it should be used toinitialize someting else that would control this.

Yes -- and in fact it _already_ does this in Emacs.

The problem is that setting the Emacs language-environment (with
`set-language-environment') _overrides_ the initial settings made based on
LANG.  That's wrong in this case, I think.

BTW, another possibly related issue is that if I start `emacs -q' with
LANG=ja_JP, then the language-environment is automatically set to
"Japanese" -- great!  But if I start `emacs -q' with LANG=ja_JP.utf8, then
the language environment is set to "utf-8", and that doesn't make much
sense to me -- indeed the whole concept of a "utf-8 language environment"
seems kind of weird.  In this case I think it should instead (1) set the
language-environt to "Japanese", and then (2) set the various I/O encodings
to be `utf-8'.

-Miles
-- 
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