Subject: Re: bug#24759: 25.1.50; electric-quote-mode

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2016 22:34:50 +0300

> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2016 22:04:28 +0300
> From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
> Cc: [email-masked]
> 
> > For starters, Emacs should not default to chinese-iso-8bit in a
> > unibyte French-language environment merely because the buffer has a
> > curved quote.
> 
> Emacs collects all the encodings that can handle all of the
> characters, then sorts them; chinese-iso-8bit is just the one that
> comes up first in the sorted order.  If you are hinting that UTF-8
> should come up first, we should just change the sorting order, that's
> all.
> 
> > That can't be what a typical French user wants.
> 
> We have no idea what the user might want.  We can guess at best, and
> offer the list of the alternatives from which to choose.  Which is
> what we do.

Please also note that by the time this prompt is displayed, Emacs has
already tried to see whether several default encodings corresponding
to the user locale and preferences can encode the text, and the answer
was NO (this information is included in the buffer popped up to the
user).  If one of the default encodings could encode the text, Emacs
would have used it without asking any questions.

Once we have tried all those defaults, and found they cannot do the
job, we've exhausted our potential of guessing "what the user wants"
reliably, so we must now ask the user to tell us that.