Re: Encoding customization variable names

[Patrice Dumas]

On Sat, Jul 23, 2022 at 04:25:02PM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> 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.

I am not saying that this does not exist anymore, but it is becoming
very uncommon.  We got a bug report recently that a file system did
not allow non UTF-8 compatible file names.  For me, this is without
doubt the general direction.  I don't know which codeset those people
use, but if it is 8bit codesets, my wild guess is that, in general, they
avoid non ASCII filenames and, in general, know what to do if they
encounter a situation with filenames in other codesets.  Which does not
mean that we shouldn't correctly document the customization variables,
it just means that issues should rarely occur.

> And what about users in the CJK world?

We only officially support UTF-8 in Texinfo as an encoding that contains
CJK characters.  Maybe this is not right, but in the current situation,
I am not sure that many issues could arise.

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

It probably exist, and hopefully will exist more, if more people use
Texinfo in non en languages/setups, but for now, it has been relatively
small.  We only started having report on non ASCII characters in UTF-8
locales very recently.

We will try to document things as well as possible, and consider all
the suggestions, but I still bet that actual use cases of file names
encoding requiring specific customizations will be very rare.

As for giving recommendations on practices related to these issues
that's not something I can personally do, as I do not face those issues
enough.

-- 
Pat