Bug#186996: suggestion: en_US.ISO-8859-15 as default

["Julian Mehnle" <julian@mehnle.net>]

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rudolf.weeber@gmx.de wrote:
> I'd propose to set the default for locales to en_US.ISO-8859-15. As far,
> as I understand, this won't cause any problems for English speakers, and
> it enables French and German special chars at the same time.

Although the set of characters in ISO-8859-15 is much more favorable than
that in ISO-8859-1, I think this is a bad idea for two reasons:

 1. many files in the Debian distribution would have to be recoded, and

 2. such an intermediate transition from ISO-8859-1 to -15 would mitigate
the
    urge to switch to UTF-8 as the ultimate default character encoding,
which
    is definitely the right way to go in the long run!

The first argument applies to the aimed-at UTF-8 transition as well, of
course. But since the switch to UTF-8 will hopefully happen *in any case*
sooner or later, there's no need to perform an extra transition before
that.

Julian.

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