Re: UTF-8 in Debian-Edu
ons, 19,.01.2005 kl. 16.29 +0100, skrev Jonas Smedegaard:
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> On 19-01-2005 12:50, Harald Thingelstad wrote:
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> > I hope the debian people could just one day step forward, and start
> > using utf-8 all globally. Basic integration issues should be over by
> > now, and it'd make multilangual environments *so* much easier.
>
> Debian wants to support freedom of choice between UTF-8 and older
> encodings - for as long as it makes sense. That is an approach similar
> to that of supporting several different versions of a library concurrently.
>
> Example: Perl 5.6 in current official stable release of Debian do not
> support Unicode properly.
Debian as "a collection of packages", yes.
But when I said "start using utf-8 all globally", I meant using it as a
viable option, perhaps even default settings. There are far too many
archives stored with older charsets to do away with them entirely.
The situation with Debian right now is, you have to override all the
defaults.
Even debian-installer sets a norwegian language installation to use
ISO-latin, no matter what you set the packages up with.
(Imagine my surprise when I found the installation system had, not only
changed my "locales" settings, but initialized the database templates of
Postgresql with ISO8859-1 instead of UTF-8 (as had been set during
preconfiguration). Had to re-initialize the whole thing to get it like I
wanted.)
Plus Skolelinux, and to some length Debian-edu, is meant as a
preconfigured system.
When it comes to preconfigured systems, default values need some
thought.
When I said "should be over by now", I meant Sarge not Woody.
It isn't all that transparent, no, but many of the languages I mentioned
weren't even available in Woody. Not by far.
What I want is to see at least Sarge-based Skolelinux be able to handle
many different languages on a system. Current setup is "a limited set of
characters at a time".
Sarge has supported perl 5.8 for some time now, where all remaining
unicode problems are said to be solved. Haven't heard any more of these
troubles, Redhat has defaulted to UTF-8 for some while now, so it
shouldn't be so hard to fix.
Probably, what's left are some few programs where the
developers/maintainers haven't woken up yet. I hope it's time to smell
the coffee.
Harald
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