Re: 8859 unification and Emacs' ChangeLog files

[Jason Rumney <jasonr@gnu.org>]

kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann) writes:

> But if all Emacs developers enable unify-8859-on-decoding-mode, then
> this is not a problem anymore.

It is still a problem, because some users will end up saving all
Latin characters unified to Latin-1 while others will save all
unified to Latin-2 etc. So there will be a lot of unnecessary changed
lines in each checkin.

>  Or the ChangeLog files could be stored as UTF-8.

This could certainly work, if we think UTF-8 support in Emacs now is
good enough to handle it reliably.

> Of course, there might be other files where iso-8859 characters might
> be present in different encodings.  Is it right to say that these
> files must be encoded in iso-2022 or in emacs-mule, because no other
> encodings distinguish between Latin-1 ä and Latin-2 ä, say?

Yes, many of the files in leim, lisp/international and lisp/language
need to make the distinction between different Latin charsets.

> If I understand correctly, Emacs 22 will automatically unify all
> iso-8859 charsets, so the same ChangeLog problem will occur there,
> right?  Or is Emacs 22 going to enable distinguishing between Latin-1
> ä and Latin-2 ä for iso-2022 files somehow?

I think the future plan is to support keeping the distinction
(somehow) even though the internal representation is unicode.