Re: Encoding customization variable names

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2022 14:15:58 +0200
> From: Patrice Dumas <pertusus@free.fr>
> Cc: GavinSmith0123@gmail.com, bug-texinfo@gnu.org
> 
> On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 09:20:19AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > This should IMO come with a set of recommendations regarding the
> > practices: when and for what reasons to override the defaults, and
> > with what recommended values.  Otherwise, users of Texinfo will not
> > necessarily understand the subtleties, and the result will be chaos.
> 
> It seems to me that there should be very little need for the user to set
> anything.  On GNU/Linux and unix which use UTF-8 everywhere nowadays,
> there is no real issue.  On Windows, DOC_ENCODING_FOR_INPUT_FILE_NAME
> default is set especially based on your recommendations.  The situations
> where some customization would be needed are likely to be very rare,
> involving non ascii filenames and manuals produced on computers with
> different encodings.  In those cases, the users will also probably have
> trouble with use of mixed encodings for file and directory names,
> reducing even more the plausibility of situations handled with setting
> encodings using customization variables in texi2any.

Are you saying that Unix systems with non-UTF-8 locales no longer
exist?  Because I'm familiar with several people whose locale on
GNU/Linux does not use UTF-8 as the codeset.

And what about users in the CJK world?

But if we want to ignore those, I agree with you that the problem
largely doesn't exist.

> Correctly encoding and decoding file names, however, and setting the
> right defaults, is important to handle non ascii characters in files.

I was specifically talking about the situations where users may wish
to consider overriding the defaults.