Re: Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
On Fri, 2003-01-17 at 17:49, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Sorry for the late entry into the discussion. I am
> comfortable with making the changelog UTF-8 only, but file names in
> pure UTF-8 perhaps is premature. (मनोज्.conf, anyone?).
Please see my second proposal (the third in #99933), which drops the
recommendation for programs to create and read filenames in UTF-8.
Of course, this doens't make the problem go away; we will still have
some programs creating filenames in UTF-8, and others in the locale
charset.
> Indeed,
> until we have a wider deployment of a font that has a decent
> coverage of UTF-8 glyphs (haw many of y'all can read ሰማይ አይታረስ ንጉሥ
> አይከሰስ። ?),
I admittedly can't; Evolution will have somewhat poor support for
non-Latin Unicode until it's ported to GNOME 2. But note that UTF-8
will work quite well I think for users of Latin and East Asian
languages, because we do have good, widely available free fonts for
those.
> perhaps we should stick to pure ascii file names, if we
> must have policy take a stance about file names at all?
First of all, I strongly believe policy should have a stance about file
names. People will want to have packages including filenames with
include non-ASCII characters. There are something like 15-20 in Debian
now, and that number is probably small because of this encoding mess.
And if those packages want to, we need a defined encoding for doing so.
I think it is pretty obvious that UTF-8 is the only sane choice.
Second, people will want to create files with non-ASCII names on their
own computers; it would be bad policy specifed one charset, but users
were creating files in another. But we can leave this issue aside for
now.
> That is not saying anything about programs that deal with
> file names having widechar and encoding support, etc. I feel, as
> integrators, we must follow, rather than lead, the majority of the
> producers of the software components we integrate.
I understand your position. In my latest proposal, policy is silent on
the encoding for file names to be used by programs in general.
We can fill that in later (and I think we will be filling it in with
UTF-8), but I'd really like to set up the Unicode infrastructure in
policy now. This will also have the effect of letting people know our
intentions now, and hopefully spark a few upstream authors into adding
Unicode support.
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