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

[Richard Stallman]

    > It works correctly, provided the characters in that string can be
    > expressed in the unibyte buffer.

    But which characters can be expressed is poorly specified.  E.g. Tell me
    which chars can be expressed in a unibyte buffer in a BIG5 locale?

Mentioning the locale is somewhat of a red herring, since what controls
this conversion is (effectively) nonascii-insert-offset.

Mentioning BIG5 is a second red herring.  You can't represent Chinese
in 8-bit characters, but that is not Emacs' fault.

Do you think that we need to document nonascii-insert-offset more
prominently?  If so, where else should we talk about it?

    > If people generally agree it would be better to signal an error,
    > we could do that.  However, that would cause trouble trying to use
    > M-y to move past multibyte entries in the kill ring to reach the
    > unibyte entry you really want.

    When the insertion is a user-level operation, the elisp code should make
    sure to manually do the encoding/decoding, using e.g. the default file
    coding-system.

I don't understand -- could you be more specific?