Encoding in buffers not associated with files

Question

1. I use Magit to manage Git repositories.
2. Some of these repositories have collaborators whose names contain accented characters.
3. In a freshly-started Emacs, everything looks fine.
4. In a long-running Emacs process, such accented characters eventually start being rendered incorrectly.
5. These characters appear in a magit buffer
   • which is not associated with a file
   • in a special portion of the buffer which is not accessible with the usual Emacs navigation commands, search commands, etc.

How should I go about understanding and fixing this problem?

Answer 1

Emacs decides how to decode output from subprocesses (like git) based on the value of default-process-coding-alist (and others, see (elisp) Default Coding Systems). The default value for this variable generally works well.

It sounds like you have some package that changes it; if you have a recent Emacs 26 snapshot you could use the watchpoint feature to track it down. Something along the lines of:

(defun debug-if-setting (symbol newval op where)
  "Call debugger if setting SYMBOL's value.
Don't do anything if let-binding."
  (if (or inhibit-debug-on-entry debugger-jumping-flag
          (not (eq op 'set)))
      nil
    (let ((inhibit-debug-on-entry t))
      (funcall debugger 'watchpoint symbol newval op where))))
(add-variable-watcher 'default-process-coding-system #'debug-if-setting)

Alternatively, you could paper over the problem with:

(defun use-default-process-coding (fun &rest args)
  (let ;; Replace the value with whatever you have by default.
       ((default-process-coding-system '(utf-8-unix . utf-8-unix)))
    (apply fun args)))
(advice-add 'magit--process-coding-system :around #'use-default-process-coding)