Re: lisp/ChangeLog coding system

[Stefan Monnier]

> One aspect is making better guesses about desired coding systems.

I'm not sure what kind of improvements you're thinking about.

> Another is getting the trash coding systems out of the prompt to the user.

I agree that the more "esoteric" systems should be made less
visible.  They are already pushed to the end of the list, but
the list is long (because it always includes the "catch-all"
systems like emacs-mule, iso-2022 and iso8859-with-esc) and looks
just very confusing.  We should probably try to split it into
"likely" and "unlikely" options.  Where the cut-off point should be,
I don't know (non-MIME coding-systems should be in the "unlikely"
list, tho).

>  Eg, I doubt most users _ever_ want to use the -with-esc coding
> systems.  (As far as I can tell X Compound Text should serve the
> purpose fine, and users can tell for sure that they don't know what it
> does.  The ISO-8859-with-esc are tempting for naive users as "the
> closest to what I want").

I don't even know why those systems exist.

> A sample implementation of these aspects (for XEmacs only) is latin-unity:

I'm not sure in which sense this is related.

> The two big problems with this package (to the author's mind ;-) are
> that it doesn't handle anything but ISO Latin yet, and it doesn't work
> on GNU Emacs.  The beta testers seem happy with the functionality.
> The UI needs tuning, of course.

Looking at the README, I have the impression that most of the functionality
is already part of the Emacs CVS code (mostly thanks to Dave's
ucs-tables.el).  Someone should try and figure out the details.


        Stefan