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

[Paul Eggert]

On 12/19/18 10:11 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> I need to hear a second opinion,

That would actually be a third opinion, as Stefan's opinion surely 
counts too and he has good reasons to prefer UTF-8 here. And to some 
extent opinions should be weighted for the kind of maintenance that is 
actually done with these files as opposed to the rare cases where the 
font's style might annoy a language-expert developer if the wrong 
language environment were used.

>> etc/HELLO is pretty much a disaster for me now, as I can’t use any tool
>> other than Emacs to look at it
>
> ??? It's a UTF-8 file with markup.  Do you have the same problems with
> HTML and XML files?

No, because when I visit those files I see the same thing in my Emacs 
editing buffer that I see after using common keystrokes like 'C-x v =' 
or standard tools like "git diff", and it's easy to use Emacs to edit 
these files in the usual way without becoming expert in html-mode etc. 
In contrast, with etc/HELLO standard tools and common keystrokes give me 
gibberish, and one must gain expertise in enriched-mode to make 
nontrivial changes.

A primary goal of Emacs is to have source code that the user can change 
easily, and using enriched-text mode in etc/HELLO works against this. It 
might be OK just for that one file (as a demonstration of enriched-text 
mode perhaps) but as things stand we shouldn't let these issues infect 
the rest of the Emacs sources.