Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
On Sat, 2003-01-04 at 06:10, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Jan 04, Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> wrote:
>
> >In summary, UTF-8 is the *only* sane character set to use for
> >filenames.
> True, but does not work in reality for too many people, so this cannot
> be made mandatory.
Note that in my proposal UTF-8 filenames are only mandatory (a "must")
for files *included directly* in Debian packages or created by
maintainer scripts. Since I don't think we have any packages including
anything but ASCII filenames, this will not change a thing. UTF-8
filenames for programs in general is just a "should", to be eventually
upgraded to a "must" when we have even more support in major programs.
But now is the time to get a strong statement of support for Unicode in
policy, and start fixing the remaining programs.
> > Major upstream software for Debian like GNOME is moving
> >towards requiring UTF-8 for filenames, and we should too. See for
> >example:
> This is false. GNOME does not requires UTF-8, it's just a default.
That's true, you can set a G_BROKEN_FILENAMES variable. But we should
not expect upstream authors to implement such hacks in general.
G_BROKEN_FILENAMES is exactly what its name implies; a workaround for a
broken system. Plus, can you imagine setting a variable for each of the
different programs you use?
Other operating systems like Windows and MacOS have had this problem
solved for a long time. We need to do it.
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