On 8 April 2012 17:36, Faré fahree@gmail.com wrote:
I think requiring a few marginal hackers doing weird things to specifiy :encoding :default is a small price to pay for everyone to be able to specify
I disagree. Consider this:
X has a system that used to be in, say, LATIN-9. He uses latin-9 at home, and everything works fine. His users either use it as well, or at least another single-byte encoding.
ASDF is updated, and X's user reports breakage. Everything works fine for X, because he didn't update ASDF yet. So he updates ASDF, and X updates his system to specify :LATIN-9 (or :DEFAULT, or whatever).
Now another of his users reports breakage, because /they/ didn't update ASDF yet -- and their ASDF doesn't support :ENCODING, so things break. They update ASDF, which in turn breaks another :LATIN-N system they were using.
The potential cost is non-trivial, and I really don't pretend to know eg. how many Japanese hackers user non-UTF-encodings in their source.
IMO encouraging people to add :encoding :utf-8 is much saner.
Cheers,
-- Nikodemus