On 05/05/2012 at 22:28, Martin Eberhard Schauer <Martin.E.Schauer@gmx.de> wrote: > Is it safe to do so nowadays? Are there reasons not to do so? Debian uses UTF-8 encoding by default since Etch, which was released in April 2007. Every new installation since then is UTF-8-compliant and will display U+2026 (…) character just fine. But note, that users may had changed default encoding after installation (although I see no reason for this) and systems upgraded to Etch from earlier releases were needed to be converted to UTF-8 manually. As there are people out there who managed to have one Debian installation since Potato, non-UTF-8 systems may not be so uncommon. As for systems not compliant with UTF-8, users will see artifacts instead of UTF-8 characters. I have attached screenshot of ISO-8859-2 Debian displaying UTF-8 U+2192 (→) character. I trust I don't have to say where it was supposed to be ;) . In Polish Debian Packages Description Translation team we have decided to stick with ISO-8859-2 character set for some time. If your team member has asked you to use UTF-8 characters, then perhaps German team is less conservative than we are. I think you should stick with your team policy and go on with UTF-8 characters. -- Best regards Mirosław Zalewski
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