Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> writes:
> > As I see it, the current (broken ?) behaviour is, to use the user's
> > locale setting (LC_CTYPE) to encode file names.
>
> It appears so, and yes, this behavior is completely and fundamentally
> broken.
Whether or not this is broken is debatable. It is the current status
quo, though, on a majority of systems. Breaking that nilly-willy is
not acceptable.
I'd prefer:
1. Programs are extended to handle UTF8 filenames iff LC_CTYPE is
UTF8. Programs that right now cope with other charsets can keep
this support if LC_CTYPE is set to any other value (even C).
Filenames incompatible with the current locale must be handled
reasonably.
Once this is implemented for a resonable percentage of packages:
2. An UTF8 locale is made the default on new installations. For
upgrades scripts are provided to convert filesystem trees over to
UTF8. Do a release.
3. Support for non-UTF8 charsets is deprecated, removed, or succumbs
to bit rot.
> Again, major chunks of upstream software which have Unicode support
> (like GNOME), are *already* defaulting to interpreting filenames as
> UTF-8 by default. I am just trying to bring policy in line with best
> practise in this regard.
Yeah, and the Gnome2 file dialog completely ignores my latin1
filenames. That's best practise?
Anyway, for my daily living Gnome2 is a quite irrelevant chunk of
software. aterm, zsh, xemacs, mozilla are much more important. Only
half of these support UTF8 right now AFAIK. I'd guess from the
80%-software in Debian less than 50 % handle UTF8.
--
Robbe
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