Bug#603915: release-notes: Please document that use of non-UTF8 locales is strongly discouraged
Le jeudi 30 décembre 2010 à 20:22 +0100, Julien Cristau a écrit :
> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 16:15:10 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
>
> > Hi there,
> >
> > On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 02:18:10PM +0100, Josselin Mouette wrote:
> > > given that we regularly identify bugs, at least for GNOME, that manifest
> > > only when using a non-UTF8 locale - and I mean important bugs like not
> > > being able to unlock the screensaver, non-working screenreader, or
> > > impossibility to list filenames in both a terminal and the file
> > > navigator - I think the release notes should strongly advise users of
> > > legacy locales to upgrade to UTF-8.
> >
> > Are there bug reports for these individual issues that you mention? Locale
> > encoding is a touchy political issue as well as involving a certain
> > coordinated transition in the case of shared filesystems, so if we're going
> > to recommend that users switch to UTF-8 as part of the upgrade to squeeze,
> > I'd like us to be able to point somewhere for more information about the
> > problems they'll run into if they don't.
> >
> Joss, ping?
Hm, sorry for the delay.
For the screensaver, I don’t recall a specific bug number, there were
many of them. Some issues were fixed, but various things like passwords
with non-ASCII characters, pam_ldap support, or even the ability to
unlock your screen, work only randomly if you don’t use UTF8.
For the screenreader, that would be #599197. It’s just an example,
really - I’m sure there are many other unreproducible bugs we receive
that are caused by non-UTF8 locales. It should really be emphasized that
probably none of the GNOME and KDE developers are using non-UTF8
locales, neither upstream nor in Debian. We just happen to be randomly
able to fix some of the issues that users of legacy locales report.
For the file manager, it is probably the worst since it’s a design
choice. Nautilus (and all glib-based programs, and ISTR all Qt-based
programs too) assume that filenames are in UTF-8, while the shell
assumes they are in the current locale’s encoding. In daily use,
non-ASCII filenames are just unusable in such setups.
Cheers,
--
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