On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 01:45:40PM +0200, Siggy Brentrup wrote: > On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 13:09 +0200, Thomas Koch wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I've an issue, that I forgot to set the character encoding of tomcat to utf-8 > > after reinstalling a server. > > Now, before I report a wishlist(?) bug to tomcat, I want to ask (and invite to > > discuss) shouldn't utf8 be the default character set everywhere? So when > > installing a package from Debian I can assume that where a character encoding > > can be set, it't set to utf8. > > MySQL would be another example, which to my knowledge uses isoXYZ as default > > character encoding. > > While utf-8 covers the broadest set of character glyphs possible, it > suffers from size as well as performance penalties. Characters no > longer are guaranteed to fit in a byte, how do you define > strlen(utf8_string) &c pp. All these issues have been solved but not > for free. Of course there's a penalty for certain operations. But UTF-8 is about as compact as an extended encoding is going to get. > There are a lot of users out there that are not willing to pay the price > for increased generality. These users will need to change their character encoding to something else. But the Debian default should remain UTF-8. Those not willing to pay the flexibility/performance tradeoff are the exception, and will need to customise their environment accordingly. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please GPG sign your mail.
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