Roger Leigh: > At a later point, we should also look into recoding > our documentation into UTF-8. Insofar as our documentation has upper-plane Latin-1 (or terminal-shift) characters embedded, this is sensible. However, we need to continue to think carefully about this. We are going to support Unicode because we have no practical alternative. However, Unicode is a bad standard. It is highly overwrought. Its philosophy is wrong. Its use complicates many things which do not need complication. Insofar as it contaminates clean ascii in Debian source code and English-language documentation, it is not a good thing. Past character-set discussions on debian-devel have established that many of the eastern European DDs feel strongly about spelling their own Roman-alphabet names without compromising with Latin-1. Consensus was that we should respectfully support this and other sensible uses of Unicode, and I agree with the consensus. However, past character-set discussions on debian-devel have also established how maddening it is to see a '-' in a man page, unsearchable because it is not really a '-'; it is an en-dash or a minus or an Inuit glottal stop or something else you can't distinguish and can't type. It has also been observed (by me at least) that Unicode vastly complicates or altogether breaks rational assumptions about how a simple printf() will display on the terminal. If I lose the easy ability to make a column of ':' line neatly up in column 25 of the terminal, while gaining the ability to display Nepalese subjoined circumflexes and the International Phonetic Alphabet bidirectionally, this is probably not a win for me. Now, I do have some ideas as to what Debian can do about this. If you prod me, I am not unlikely to begin to post them now. Otherwise, not wanting to weigh the release party down with such heavy discussions, I would save them for a later thread of their own, perhaps after a month or two. -- Thaddeus H. Black 508 Nellie's Cave Road Blacksburg, Virginia 24060, USA +1 540 961 0920, t@b-tk.org, thb@debian.org
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