Bug#1026231: debian-policy: document droppage of support for legacy locales
On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:47:42AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Jan 2023 at 16:30:46 -0700, Anthony Fok wrote:
> > In their mind, GB 18030 encompasses a lot more than just
> > a character encoding mapping table. It is the full support package
> > (including fonts, display, printing, input methods, etc.) for Han
> > Chinese and all other minority languages used in China.
>
> Preferring to use Unicode does seem to be the direction that all of
> computing is going in, as a simplifying assumption - for example W3C
> advice for HTML is "You should always use the UTF-8 character encoding"[1]
> - and as we know, things that aren't tested usually don't work. So I
> think the level of functionality for non-UTF-8 locales and encodings in
> the software we package is going to decline over time, whether Debian
> wants it to or not.
It is true for everything. Users know how to pick the software that works for their
environment. It is not relevant that software they do not use do not support their
environment.
Telling users to switch to UTF-8 because such and such software they never used
and were never going to use do not support GB18030 does not make sense.
It is like saying the Linux console is deprecated because there are Debian
packages that requires X or Wayland.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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