Bug#99324: Default charset should be UTF-8

[Fumitoshi UKAI <ukai@debian.or.jp>]

At 31 May 2001 14:04:39 +1000,
Brian May wrote:

> >>>>> "Cesar" == Cesar Eduardo Barros <cesarb@nitnet.com.br> writes:
> 
>     Cesar> - Making sure everything works with UTF-8 charset
> 
> Biggest problem for me, here (unless that has changed in the past
> month or so) is xemacs. Probably the same for emacs too, not
> sure. Once I opened a message, and Gnus had heart failure when it said
> it couldn't find the UTF-8 charset inside xemacs (actually, the
> message was ISO-8859-1, so it doesn't entirely make sense),

AFAIK, emacsen could handle UTF-8 with mule-ucs package.
If policy claims to make sure everything works with UTF-8 charset, 
should mule-ucs be merged into each emacsen?

>     Cesar> - Adding UTF-8 charset for every locale
>     Cesar> - Converting (in debian/rules) documentation files to UTF-8
>     Cesar> - Selecting en_US.UTF-8 (or something like that) as the default for LANG=
>     Cesar> - Echoing some magic sequence on every getty to convert the kernel mode to UTF8

Is kernel support UTF-8 other than latin chars?

> These sound like time consuming tasks, so the sooner we start, the
> better.  Just don't expect to finish for a while (eg. aim for
> woody+1).
> 
> First priority should be to ensure that all programs work with
> UTF-8. Ideally, this should be done for woody (but may not be
> possible).

I don't think it's possible for woody.
 
> How do tools (eg. debconf) know what coding set to use when reading a
> file (eg. templates file)? Or, is ISO-8859-1 assumed?

debconf doesn't assume any encoding, does it?
We're usually using EUC-JP charset for debconf.

Regards,
Fumitoshi UKAI