Subject: bug#6866: mule-cmds.el just _assumes_ all of Taiwan uses Big5 and not UTF-8

From: Jason Rumney <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Aug 2010 22:07:52 +0800

On 16/8/2010 9:39 PM, [email-masked] wrote:
> Well anyway, for our locale me and my friends all use zh_TW.UTF-8 and
> stopped using zh_TW.big5 years ago. So at least it looks very dumb there
> in mule-cmds.el that the zh_CN people can use UTF-8, but the HK and TW
> are locked in the dark ages:
>
>      ("zh_HK" . "Chinese-Big5")
>      ("zh_TW" . "Chinese-Big5")
>      ("zh_CN.UTF-8" . "Chinese-GBK")
>      ("zh_CN" . "Chinese-GB")

GBK is a backwards compatible extension of GB with more characters.  I'm 
not sure that Big5 has an equivalent.  In all these cases, the character 
set is used to select preferences for fonts, input methods and other 
language sensitive things, and has nothing to do with UTF-8 (which is 
used as a preference for file encoding when specified).