Re: [gnu.org #1363250] ASCII maintain.txt is no longer ASCII

[Alfred M. Szmidt]

   Just before we go off at too many tangents, a bit of background info for
   this discussion.

   * ASCII is a well defined standard, and all ASCII is UTF-8 (but the
     converse is not true).

   *  The command iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII file will fail unless all the
      characters in file are already ASCII.  Hence it isn't a very useful
      command.

   * The coding standards say that we should prefer ASCII wherever
     possible.  If it is not possible, then we should use UTF-8.

There is no mention of prefering UTF-8.

I would also argue that it does not say to prefer ASCII "wherever
possible" -- rather the opposite, that _if_ we have words that use
accented characters we can write them (even preferably) using some
other encoding.  But I guess that is a bit of a "we read it
differently topic", and the GCS not being the law. :-)


  Sticking to the ASCII character set (plain text, 7-bit characters) is
  preferred in GNU source code comments, text documents, and other
  contexts, unless there is good reason to do something else because of
  the application domain.  For example, if source code deals with the
  French Revolutionary calendar, it is OK if its literal strings contain
  accented characters in month names like "Flore'al".  Also, it is OK to
  use non-ASCII characters to represent proper names of contributors in
  change logs (*note Change Logs::).

     If you need to use non-ASCII characters, you should normally stick
  with one encoding, as one cannot in general mix encodings reliably.