[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

debian-changelog-file-uses-obsolete-national-charset



Greetings,

I got this Error message for the first time this morning.  Nice of Debian to
expect UTF-8 for everything, but unpractical given how my GPG key and a number
of other things were created in the days of Latin-1.  

If I change my locale setting to fi_FI.UTF-8@euro [1], debsign can no longer
find my GPG key, because it expects the accent on my name to be encoded in
UTF-8, even though the key was created in Latin-1.

Another thing is, several remote sites I need to access on a daily basis simply
do not offer UTF-8 locales.  In those cases, I still need a terminal that
functions in Latin-1, including all accented characters.  Switching locale would
definitely break a lot of things there, because the remote end would receive
accented characters using UTF-8 escape sequences, instead of plain Latin-1.

Then, has anybody checked if the content of /etc/passwd is UTF-8 friendly?  If
I'm gonna recode my name, might as well recode it everywhere, including there.

In a nutshell, while I can clearly benefits from switching to UTF-8, it still
appears to be a largely undocumented process that offers plenty of pitfalls.

However... If anybody has clear solutions to ALL the above issues, I would
gladly hear them.  :-)


[1] Shouldn't this @euro crap be gone by now? I mean the Euro is the only
currency here since a few years already.  Should fi_FI mean ISO-8859-15 by
default, at this point?

-- 
Martin-Éric Racine, ICT Consultant
http://www.pp.fishpool.fi/~q-funk/



Reply to: