bug#40097: 28.0.50; Preferred font ignored for specific charset

[Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com>]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Sergey Organov <sorganov@gmail.com>
>> Cc: Kenichi Handa <handa@gnu.org>,  40097@debbugs.gnu.org
>> Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2020 07:43:39 +0300
>> 
>> > We could perhaps introduce a customizable variable that would allow
>> > users who want that to disable the preference of charset-supporting
>> > fonts when the text has the 'charset' property.  CC'ing Handa-san who
>> > could comment on how important is this feature nowadays.
>> 
>> When I wrote original question, I was sure I've read somewhere in the
>> docs that Emacs does prefer fonts with particular encoding, and then I
>> missed it and can't find it anymore. I wonder if it is even documented,
>> or did I read it somewhere else, maybe in some relevant discussion?
>> 
>> I mean if it's even undocumented and is not important nowadays, maybe
>> it's indeed better to drop it rather than bother with customizations.
>> And if it is to be customizable, it should probably be a fontset feature
>> rather than global?
>
> The customizable option indeed only makes sense if the feature is
> still useful to some users in some use cases; otherwise we should just
> remove this.
>
> The fact that this is or isn't documented has no importance: we don't
> document the internal implementation details, but we keep them as long
> as they do what users expect and like.

IMHO, in general, when a thing is documented its removal must receive
more thought. Just another factor in favor of future support. Not much,
but still... And this one apparently doesn't have it.

-- Sergey