Re: charsets in debian/control
Thaddeus H. Black <t@b-tk.org> wrote:
> We are not speaking of a stricken Polish L, a
> double-accented Magyar O, or a euro sign. We are
> speaking of... well, to tell the truth I have no idea
> what these letters are. Have you? More to the point,
> should you and I learn to recognize such letters?
> Should we expect basic Latin terminal fonts to cover
> them? Is it reasonable to marginalize the =E1's and =FC's
> of Latin-1 by lumping them with the "squat reversed
> esh"?
Why is it important that you recognise them? I can't see any reasonable
argument against UTF-8 that doesn't also remove anything other than
ascii.
> In my view, a terminal which cannot correctly display
> the "=E1" is somewhat broken, and a user who does not
> recognize the "=E1" probably should learn. I would not
> say the same with respect to the "squat reversed esh".
> However, this is just my view.
Defining the character set as utf-8 means that any non-unicode capable
application is going to have issues, yes. But so does defining the
character set as anything other than ascii - people using a non-8859-1
terminal encoding won't be able to read any of the non-ascii characters
in the file.
The only two character sets that make any sense whatsoever in the Unix
world are ascii and UTF-8. I'd be happy with either, but I've got a
fairly anglo-centric viewpoint. I can see a strong argument for
maintainers actually being allowed to spell their name properly, even if
pragmatism suggests that we want a latinised version available as well.
--
Matthew Garrett | mjg59-chiark.mail.debian.devel@srcf.ucam.org
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