Subject: Re: bug#44513: default value of file-name-coding-system

From: Boruch Baum <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 8 Nov 2020 07:27:03 -0500

On 2020-11-08 13:29, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> On November 8, 2020 11:15:50 AM GMT+02:00, Boruch Baum <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > Shouldn't emacs ship with the default value of variable
> > file-name-coding-system being equal to that of the default value of
> > default-file-name-coding-system?
> >
> >                  file-name-coding-system  => nil
> >   (default-value file-name-coding-system) => nil
> >          default-file-name-coding-system  => utf-8-unix
>
> These are 2 separate variables, see the doc string of default-file-name-coding-system.  One is for the user to set, thus nil by default, the other is what Emacs thinks should be the OS default.  They are separate because Unix filesystems traditionally treat file names as byte streams, without imposing any encoding restrictions on them.

I'm proposing that even the one that's 'for the user to set' should have
a sane default. I'm a user, and it never occurred to me I needed to set
that variable (among all the other emacs variables begging a
customization). What percentage of users do you think install emacs and
on their own initiative say, "Of course, I now need to set
file-name-coding-system". If so, maybe it should be part of the official
emacs tutorial (sarcasm)?

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