Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 13:50, John Goerzen wrote:
> I don't disagree. I'm saying that your solution is worse than the problem.
Sorry, we have to start somewhere. Unicode is the way of the future,
and if we wait until every vendor of some random terminal updates it
with support for UTF-8, we will never start.
Now is a good time, since (again) major chunks of upstream software
included in Debian like GNOME are making a major push towards UTF-8.
> "may introduct incompatibilities" is something of an understatement.
> "Break compatibility with 50 years' worth of computing and almost
> every other vendor" is more accurate.
Well, that's what we're going to do.
> I do not buy that for one minute. Surely it is possible to translate
> things back to a character set the terminal actually supports?
If we change programs to output to the terminal in the locale's
encoding, then yes, it will work, at least if the terminal's charset
covers all of the characters in question (which it may not).
> Is that not why we have the "@UTF8" designator for our LANG settings?
Not sure how this is related to what you're saying.
> Perhaps you mean "it is EASIEST to break compatibility." That may be
> true. That is also the wrong motivation.
We will try to preserve compatibility as much as possible.
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