Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>]

Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> writes:

>> I think that this would be a really bad idea, because it would be a to
>> severe restriction on the set of supported terminal types.  Think of
>> remote logins from non-Debian machines: we cannot control the program
>> at the other end of the line.  And what about serial (hardware) VT-220
>> terminals?  We cannot change the hardware and to loose support for it
>> would be not nice.
>
> That's true, but I don't think there is really anything we can do to
> solve that problem.

Then your solution is broken.  Seriously, this would be a huge problem
for many people.

>> So in my opinion we cannot drop support for non-UTF8 locales and
>> terminals.  We need to do file-name conversion here.
>
> Well, such terminals should be explicitly marked as deprecated inside
> Debian.  Actually, probably the best solution is for the terminal to be
> able to switch encodings at runtime; the experimental gnome-terminal can
> do this.

You can't very well take an actual vt100 and do that.  Even on other
hardware, like older Suns, it's not all that easy.

I am vehemently opposed to any proposal that renders Debian
substantially unusable on existing ASCII/latin1 terminals.  I think it
is great to use Unicode internally, but we clearly are not pursuing
the right path if we introduce such breakage.

(Yes, this would mean that TERM=vt100 is now deprecated)