[darcs-users] Proposal: make DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_8BIT=1 the default

[Ben Franksen]

...now that the encoding stuff is in screened, this seems to be a
sensible move. It means that darcs will show non-ASCII text (in meta
data as well as in content) in un-escaped form in the user's locale
encoding. Things like control characters are still escaped by default as
are spaces at the end of a line.

I guess this is what people expect from a tool like darcs nowadays. I
also guess that few users even know about this environment setting. And
casual users or newcomers will tend to think that encodings other than
ASCII still aren't well supported in darcs.

Of course, the user's locale encoding might not be the one in which a
patch was recorded, in which case the text might look strange. But with
the wide-spread use of UTF8 these days this is becoming less and less
likely (and there remains the option to explicitly set the environment
variable to 0).

I have a (simple) patch for that but I want to give users and devs the
opportunity to voice any objections.

Cheers
Ben