bug#33796: 27.0.50; Use utf-8 is all our Elisp files

[Stefan Monnier]

> The .elc files are identical, but visiting the .el files will (or
> might) use different fonts, because the charset information is lost.
> (You will see that I jumped through some hoops to do something similar
> with etc/HELLO.)

That's indeed what I understand of the situation.  But I don't think
it's a good reason to keep supporting non-utf-8 encoding for ever
(many/most programming languages only support a single encoding,
typically ASCII or utf-8 nowadays).
Part of the purpose of this bug-report is to try and come up with a plan ;-)

Hence, there are some questions:
- Do those people who edit those files really care about the difference?
  After all, IIUC utf-8 is becoming standard even in the CJK world so
  maybe the change is not that terrible (or at least, users have gotten
  used to lowering their expectations in this respect).
- If the change is indeed problematic, can we adjust it by using
  a file-global language tag?
- If that's not sufficient, can we use a scheme like that
  of etc/HELLO but to keep the files directly usable as Elisp (so as to
  have our cake and eat it too)?

> So I don't think we should make this change without considering
> whether the charset information is as important nowadays as it was
> back then.

How 'bout installing the titdic-cnv.el part which changes the coding
system used for the generated quail files (being auto-generated their
rending as source files shouldn't matter nearly as much since noone
should edit them)?

> And I'm not really sure who to ask about this.

I added Handa in the Cc, since I had forgotten to add him to the
X-Debbugs-Cc.


        Stefan