Re: [PATCH] * etc/NEWS: Announce addition of BOM to utf-8-auto

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Tom Gillespie <tgbugs@gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, 29 Jan 2023 14:11:13 -0500
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> > > +** The 'utf-8-auto' coding-system now includes a byte order mark
> >
> > This is inaccurate: the change is only on encoding, and saying that a
> > coding-system "includes" a BOM is confusing English, IMO.
> 
> Hrm. I agree. Would it be better to say something like the following?
> 
> "Encoding 'utf-8-auto' now correctly produces a byte order mark"

 Encoding with 'utf-8-auto' now correctly produces a byte order mark.

> > More importantly, it was a bugfix.  utf-8-auto was previously behaving
> > contrary to the documentation:
> > We don't announce bugfixes in NEWS, mainly because doing so would make
> > an already large file many times larger.
> 
> I understand that this is technically a bugfix, but it is also a major
> change in the actual behavior that could catch users by surprise
> and that is very difficult to detect and debug. Is it reasonable to
> use NEWS to try to mitigate the potential blast radius in such cases?

Maybe (you assume that people really read all the small print in
NEWS?).  But first, could you explain why on earth are you using
utf-8-auto _on_encoding_?  It basically makes no sense at all.

All the people who did that with whom I talked until now did it
because they thought the "auto" part was about the EOL format (CR-LF
vs Newline).  Is that so in your case as well?