Bug#603914: Please drop non-UTF8 locales

[Vincent Danjean <vdanjean.ml@free.fr>]

On 11/12/2010 06:47, Kalle Olavi Niemitalo wrote:
> Vincent Danjean <vdanjean@debian.org> writes:
> 
>>   For example, I've lots of old text data in latin1. Some of them are on
>> non-rewritable media. Being able to see them with
>> "LC_CTYPE=fr_FR less toto.txt" is very convenient.
> 
> less does not convert the characters to UTF-8 for display, so you
> also need a latin1 terminal for that command, and typing file names
> in such a terminal will make them latin1 too, which is not nice.
> Alternatively: iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 toto.txt | less

What you say is logical but I'm sure I only used "LC_CTYPE=.. less ..."
to look at old documents. I just try some experiment to be sure (my terminal
is urxvt, with LANG set to fr.FR.UTF-8, no other LC_* variables set).
lat.txt contains latin-1 text,and utf.txt contains utf-8 text.

Correct display (with ! when I found this strange):
  cat utf.txt
! cat lat.txt
  less utf.c
  LC_CTYPE=fr_FR less utf.c
  LC_CTYPE=fr_FR less lat.c
Incorrect display
  less lat.c

Now, run in a urxvt launched with LC_CTYPE=fr_FR
Correct display:
  cat lat.txt
  less lat.txt
Incorrect display:
  cat utf.txt
  less utf.txt
  LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 less utf.txt
  LC_CTYPE=fr_FR.UTF-8 less lat.txt

>>   There are also lots of old web pages written in latin1 that are still
>> used (old exercises, ...) Not being able to see them properly on a
>> Debian system would be a pain.
> 
> I don't believe you need a latin1 locale for viewing latin1 web
> pages.  The charset will be available from iconv() in any case,
> or browsers may have charset converters built in.

Ok. I do not know what will stop to work if legacy locales are
removed (ie I do not know what is using locales and what is using
other mechanisms)

  Regards,
    Vincent