Re: Debian 2.0 release requirements

[Alex Yukhimets <aqy6633@acf5.nyu.edu>]

> > > Support of 8-bit characters by default
> > > 
> > >      Some programs need special configuration options to work 8-bit
> > >      clean. This is very important for a lot of non-English users who
> > >      need to input umlauts, accented characters, etc. All Debian
> > >      packages will be configured to be 8-bit clean by default.
> > 
> > Hi.
> > 
> > I would like to question the need for this requirement. 
> > While this can be of importance to some users, it can be quite
> > annoying to others. What it means is saying "good-bye" to clean
> > ascii e-mail, etc. What is more important, *some* utilities,
> > "less" most notably, *shouldn't* be 8-bit clean. 
> 
> I don't understand that.  Could you explain that?

Sure.

it is nice property of "less" (as opposed to "more") that it filters
out all non-ascii charachters (changes them to some ^... printable
sequencies). As a result, it is not possible to trash the console by
doing "less <some binary file>" or, more important - if something
bad happened and you created a file(s) with some non-ascii charachters,
"ls" will trash the console while "ls | less" will show you everything
and let you delete it.

Thanks.

Alex Y.

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