Re: when options)mule)set-coding-system is unselectable

[Eli Zaretskii]

On 29 Jul 2002, Dan Jacobson wrote:

> RMS> I agree that this is something important to do.  I don't see precisely
> RMS> where or how Emacs would present that information.  In response to
> RMS> what action or command, when?
> 
> Well, the simplest thing to do until a better solution is found, is to
> have its lights turned back on, but a big balloon message pop if the
> user does select it, with the above "Wrong move..." message inside,
> suitably rephrased.  

The problem is, it's not really wrong to do that, it just doesn't have 
the effect you thought it would.  Changing the buffer's encoding affects 
the way it will be saved to disk, which is a perfectly valid thing a user 
might need to do.  For example, imagine a file encoded in Latin-1 which 
you'd like to recode so it's in UTF-8.

So it would be wrong to tell users this operation is a mistake, in 
general.