Preferred coding system for Japanese environments

[Paul Eggert]

In Bug#28705 it's proposed to change the default coding system for 
Japanese on non-MS-Windows systems from japanese-iso-8bit (aka EUC-JP) 
to utf-8, under the argument that most users of Emacs who are running 
under GNU, BSD or Unix systems prefer UTF-8 nowadays.

As I understand it, this change would not affect users who specify 
locales via environment variables (e.g., LC_ALL='ja_JP.utf8' or 
LC_ALL='ja_JP.eucjp' on GNU/Linux). It would affect only users who 
specify Japanese (presumably, in their .emacs files) without specifying 
a coding system.

I'm giving this heads-up on emacs-devel as it would be an incompatible 
change to longstanding practice. Please reply to address@hidden 
if you have comments or suggestions. For more, please see:

https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=28705