Bug#67913: Handling of non-English characters screwed up

[Santiago Vila <sanvila@unex.es>]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2000, Christian Pernegger wrote:

> Package: base
> Severity: important
> 
> The input and output of characters not in the traditional US-English
> alphabet either does not work at all or not correctly. Not at all is
> it consistent across packages.
> 
> Although this bug report is mostly about special German letters, I
> believe that other languages may be broken as well.
> 
> The problem became apparent on a machine I cleanly installed from
> the official potato test-cycle-2 cds. Even though I had selected
> de-latin1-nodeadkeys for my keymap, the umlaut and s-sharp keys did
> not work as expected:
> 
> 1) At the login prompt they are displayed correctly for some reason.
> 2) At the bash prompt the umlaut keys would do nothing or "beep".
>    S-sharp acted somehow like cursor-up.
> 3) In emacs they work, but are displayed as another symbol.
> 4) If I save a file in emacs and display it, say, using less, all letters
>    show up correctly.
> 
> A helpful member of debian-user pointed out to me that I could create
> ~/.inputrc and put appropriate commands in there to make bash display
> all characters. Why isn't this file created automatically by the
> installation system?

Because there is a global file for that, namely /etc/inputrc.

> Bash now does at the prompt, but if I 'touch file_with_an_umlaut', ls
> displays only '?' instead of the umlaut in the file listing...
> 
> A recent upgrade to test-cycle-3 didn't change anything. Same for an
> upgrade of the console-* packages to woody.
> 
> I never had such problems with earlier debian releases, also, when I
> boot the install CD and open a shell from there everything works.
> 
> Please get back to me if you need more information or versions of
> other packages. I don't know which are relevant. :(

Have you tried with different locales?