Re: [PATCH] [rfc] drop "coding: UTF-8" header

["Michael Kerrisk (man-pages)" <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>]

Hi Branden,

On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 at 13:07, G. Branden Robinson
<g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:

> > On 7/26/20 8:23 AM, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > > From: Mike Frysinger <vapier@chromium.org>
> > >
> > > This header is used inconsistently -- man pages are UTF-8 encoded
> > > but not setting this marker.  It's only respected by the man-db
> > > package, and seems a bit anachronistic at this point when UTF-8
> > > is the standard default nowadays.
> >
> > Thanks. Patch applied.
>
> Sorry I missed Mike's original mail, but there is _something_ else
> besides man-db that respects this "coding: utf-8" thing.
>
> It's the editor that some people might use to maintain the man pages:
> GNU Emacs[1].
>
> That said, UTF-8 is an easy encoding to detect, the Unix standard of
> many years now as you note, and for about that long Emacs has also
> scanned the ends of files for file variables as well (in a more
> expressive and powerful format), so they don't need to be packed in at
> the beginning.
>
> Also, it's no skin off me personally because I use Vim.  :P

Thanks for (once again) dropping in with some helpful information.
Still, I think it's right to apply the patch (and I don't think you
object), since, as Mike notes, the tag is used quite inconsistently,
and so it seems like no software really cares about this. And ever
since the day I accidentally opened a PDF with emacs, and found that
it actually worked, I've decided there's nothing emacs can't do :-).

Cheers,

Michael

-- 
Michael Kerrisk
Linux man-pages maintainer; http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/
Linux/UNIX System Programming Training: http://man7.org/training/