RE: charsets in debian/control
Thaddeus H. Black wrote:
> However, the typical roster of skills one masters in contributing
> broadly to Debian development is already awesome: C, C++, CPP, Make,
> Perl, Python, Autoconf, CVS, Shell, Glibc, System calls, /proc, IPC,
> sockets, Sed, Awk, Vi, Emacs, locales, Libdb, GnuPG, Readline, Ncurses,
> TeX, Postscript, Groff, XML, assembly, Flex, Bison, ORB, Lisp, Dpkg,
> PAM, Xlibs, Tk, GTK, SysVInit, Debconf, ELF, etc.---not to mention the
> use of the English language at a sophisticated technical level.
Pardon me, but I only know 18 of the 40 items you mentioned, but I don't
have a problem writing software for Debian or Linux in general.
(Some) developers having to learn (parts of) Unicode is not a _general_
problem, not the least because many already know it. It might be a
problem for _you_in_particular_, because you do not know it and don't want
to learn it.
But that isn't a very good argument against applying a perhaps somewhat
complex technology to Debian that's well suited for the job. Especially
since many tools that today can't handle multibyte encodings
(UTF-8/Unicode in particular) yet, will _have_to_ support it at some time
in the future anyway. BTW, the understanding of Unicode isn't required
for most tools, mostly the understanding of UTF-8 is sufficient, and UTF-8
is trivial.
> UTF-8 is neat, but I do not really like Unicode (you may have noticed
> this).
You might like Bytext[1] better then. SCNR ;-)
Seriously, I get the impression you don't like Unicode because _you_ don't
need it.
> Seeking essential simplicity, I would prefer to keep the full hairy
> overgrown Unicode standard from the typical Debian roster of development
> skills. Wouldn't you?
No, I wouldn't.
References:
1. http://www.bytext.org
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