Re: `.newsrc.eld' saves chinese group name in wrong coding

[Stefan Monnier]

> You can represent one of Emacs' supported Latin alphabets in
> (unencoded) unibyte strings, and Emacs will automatically convert to
> and from multibyte.

And this use was very convenient for Emacs-20 where we wanted to keep some
backward compatibility with code that was not MULE-aware.

But nowadays any code which relies on this is simply broken, AFAIC, because
it'll only work in environments using a iso-8859 encoding (more or less) and
will thus be unusable with in asian environments or in utf-8 (which is very
quickly taking over the iso-8859 world).

> However, if you store encoded text in unibyte strings, you are
> responsible for decoding and encoding when necessary.  You have to
> keep track, everywhere, of whether the data is encoded or not.

It's pretty easy to keep track of it: unibyte == encoded, multibyte
== decoded.


        Stefan