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

[Boruch Baum]

On 2020-11-08 13:29, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> On November 8, 2020 11:15:50 AM GMT+02:00, Boruch Baum <boruch_baum@gmx.com> 
> 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.

I'm proposing that even the one that's 'for the user to set' should have
a sane default. I'm a user, and it never occurred to me I needed to set
that variable (among all the other emacs variables begging a
customization). What percentage of users do you think install emacs and
on their own initiative say, "Of course, I now need to set
file-name-coding-system". If so, maybe it should be part of the official
emacs tutorial (sarcasm)?

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