Re: undecided vs utf-8

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Kenichi Handa <handa@m17n.org> writes:

> ??? When the locale is "C", emacs prefers utf-8 the most.
>
> % LANG=C emacs -Q -batch --eval '(message "%s" (car
> (coding-system-priority-list)))'
>
> should prints utf-8.

Let's see...

[larsi@quimbies ~/pgnus]$ echo $LANG
en_US

Right.  Well, I have no idea where that came from...

>> Well, this is about `undecided', and the C layer does DWIM-ish
>> processing when you ask it to decode `undecided', doesn't it?
>
> I don't know which Emacs' behaviour you describe as DWIM-ish.

Uhm...  if you ask a computer to do something vague, and the computer
does this based on settings the user is barely cognisant of, that's the
essence of DWIM.  In this case, it's looking at a string to try to guess
what the charset is ("do something vague"), and pick an answer from the
many possible based on settings the user is barely cognisant of.

I don't really see why you don't think this isn't DWIM...

> I think the best way is to provide users an easy way to
> specify a correct coding-system when they see a decoding
> error as well as the method to customize the default
> coding-system for erc.

So erc should pop up a message saying "even though this looks like
utf-8, I can tell from your locale spec that you're not expecting this,
so here's a list of 45 different charsets to choose from that the string
might be in, and I'll ask you this question for every IRC string until
you set a precedence list of charsets which I'll then force you to
choose between because utf-8 and iso-8859-1 isn't distinguishable
anyway"?  It somehow doesn't seem maximally user-friendly.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen