Bug#99324: Default charset should be UTF-8

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

>>>>> "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),

(I don't have a UTF-8 font installed, but I haven't looked hard, yet;
there are probably plenty of choices already packaged for Debian;
however, I doubt that is the reason for xemacs not supporting it).

    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

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).

How do tools (eg. debconf) know what coding set to use when reading a
file (eg. templates file)? Or, is ISO-8859-1 assumed?
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>