Re: [PATCH] Gnus; Restore multi encoding support for NNTP

[LdBeth]

>>>>> In <83mtkfg7g1.fsf@gnu.org> 
>>>>>   Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:

>> Eli> If by "using UTF-8 internally" you mean the internal representation of
>> Eli> buffer text and strings, then encoding is still needed for correct
>> Eli> handling of codepoints outside of Unicode.
>> 
>> Gnus already uses `utf-8-emacs' coding to save the newsrc.eld file for
>> a while.  According to the Elisp manual, that is the coding system
>> that can handle the internal codepoints used by Emacs.

Eli> You are saying that encoding by utf-8-emacs is a no-op?  AFAIR, that's
Eli> not true.

I mean, there should be no problem `prin1' any emacs strings to a file
saved using utf-8-emacs coding, and correctly `read' them back given
the file has `-*- coding: utf-8-emacs -*-` header line.

Encoding by utf-8-emacs was used under the assumption that Gnus from a
much older version of Emacs can safely read the file. By treating
everything as UTF-8, Gnus has already broke the compatibility with
older versions (.newsrc.eld contains wrongly encoded characters cannot
work with older version that can do the correct encode/decode of none
UTF-8 group names), so I think there has no point to continue restrict
the charset of .newsrc.eld to be ASCII readable.

And so this patch can take the advantages of both the UTF-8 internal
string encoding without the redundancy of book keeping an extra
translation table, which probably can not be as good as the approach
taken by this patch.

-- 
LDB