Re: non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias ?

[Alastair McKinstry <mckinstry@computer.org>]

Ok,

What I propose is the following:

(1) in /etc/locale.alias, we start with the line

# -*- coding: iso-8859-1 -* 
# Locale database

to signal that the file is encoded in ISO-8859-1. If the encoding is
changed, this line should be changed.
This should be documented in the locale.alias manpage (currently in
BTS).

(2) We recommend (again in the manpage) that locales be ASCII-only,
because of the can't-easily-enter-alias-while-in-conflicting-locale
problem. 
However because of backward compatability we will support the existing
aliases : people with LC_ALL=bokmål, for example, will want their
systems to continue working. We can't easily upgrade out of this
problem; users telneting or sshing from other Linux boxes (or HPUX,
where these locale aliases started) will not want their displays
broken).

(3) 'locale' gets changed to support the coding tag. This fixes the bug
where
$ unicode_start ; export LC_ALL=en_US.utf8
$ locale -a
lists 'bokml' not  'bokmål', for example.

The reason why I choose the locale 'iso-8859-1' not 'UTF-8' is that
users with LC_ALL=bokmål in their config files have the alias name in
ISO-8859-1; if we change the file /etc/locale.alias to be in UTF-8
format, these aliases are going to be displayed broken. We could go the
ISO-2022 route to fix this, but this is over-the-top, given that at the 
moment the only troublesome aliases that I know of are
 bokmål          no_NO.ISO-8859-1
 français        fr_FR.ISO-8859-1

Any objections or comments?

Regards,
-- 
Alastair McKinstry, <mckinstry@computer.org>