Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> writes:
>> Then your solution is broken. Seriously, this would be a huge problem
>> for many people.
>
> But the current situation is *already* broken! For example, for a
I don't disagree. I'm saying that your solution is worse than the problem.
> Chinese person, an ISO-8859-1 system simply cannot encode, nor display,
> their language. I am aware that for people entrenched in legacy
True. However, if the terminal only supports ISO-8859-1, there's no
way to make it magically display Chinese characters. It's a
limitation, and Unicode or not, there is no way around it.
> charsets like ISO-8859-1, the transition may introduce
> incompatibilities. But that's the price we pay to eventually make
> everything work for everyone.
"may introduct incompatibilities" is something of an understatement.
"Break compatibility with 50 years' worth of computing and almost
every other vendor" is more accurate.
>> 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.
>
> It is the only path to the future. Note that in my proposal, I do
I do not buy that for one minute. Surely it is possible to translate
things back to a character set the terminal actually supports?
Is that not why we have the "@UTF8" designator for our LANG settings?
Perhaps you mean "it is EASIEST to break compatibility." That may be
true. That is also the wrong motivation.
> suggest that programs try to re-encode from UTF-8 back to the user's
> locale charset.
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