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

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 08 Nov 2020 13:29:13 +0200

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.