[asdf-devel] source file encoding

[Nikodemus Siivola]

On 8 April 2012 17:36, Faré <fahree at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think requiring a few marginal hackers doing weird things
> to specifiy :encoding :default is a small price to pay for everyone to be able to specify

I disagree. Consider this:

X has a system that used to be in, say, LATIN-9. He uses latin-9 at
home, and everything works fine. His users either use it as well, or
at least another single-byte encoding.

ASDF is updated, and X's user reports breakage. Everything works fine
for X, because he didn't update ASDF yet. So he updates ASDF, and X
updates his system to specify :LATIN-9 (or :DEFAULT, or whatever).

Now another of his users reports breakage, because /they/ didn't
update ASDF yet -- and their ASDF doesn't support :ENCODING, so things
break. They update ASDF, which in turn breaks another :LATIN-N system
they were using.

The potential cost is non-trivial, and I really don't pretend to know
eg. how many Japanese hackers user non-UTF-encodings in their source.

IMO encouraging people to add :encoding :utf-8 is much saner.

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus