Re: Bug#99324: Default charset should be UTF-8
On Saturday 02 June 2001 18:33, Peter Novodvorsky wrote:
> Anton Zinoviev <anton@lml.bas.bg> writes:
> > On 1.VI.2001 at 14:00 Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > The real problem of Unicode is that still there is not enough support
> > for it. And at least for a few years 8-bit encodings are going to be
> > better supported than Unicode.
>
> We'll have some problems with UTF. One of them -- linux console driver
> doesn't have full unicode support. So users will be able to read
> russian texts only in X11. Imagine the situation when user just installed
> Debian and couldn't configure X during installation process. He can't
> read russian docs after this.
>
> > Nevertheless my opinion that using UTF-8 by default is a good idea. The
> > only problem is what latin1 users would think about that. Or what would
> > think some of the users of vim who hate emacs.
The issue is ofcourse not the problem we will encounter, but wether we want it
in the first place... Of course we will encounter many problems en the need
to fix lots of software, but that is the whole point. If we choose to support
UTF 100%, this will be a major drive to an international debian distro, and
would be a good driving force for open source development...
As already argued before this change will NOT happen in woody, but will start
only after the Debian 2.3 release... (Debian 3.0 would nicely indicate the
major change in the distro to UTF-8)
Another advantage i see is that by forcing software developers to upgrade
their programs to support UTF-8 is that it will filter out software no longer
being developed. (Though some programs do not need further development ?)
Egon
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