Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 15:10, John Goerzen wrote:
> Colin Walters <walters@debian.org> writes:
>
> > On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 13:50, John Goerzen wrote:
> >
> > Sorry, we have to start somewhere. Unicode is the way of the future,
> > and if we wait until every vendor of some random terminal updates it
> > with support for UTF-8, we will never start.
>
> I don't disagree that we should move to Unicode. I disagree that such
> a move must inherently remove support for legacy (or even, the
> majority of CURRENT) terminals.
Not inherently, but stuff will likely break. How much it breaks is
inversely proportial to how much work we put into it.
> Sorry, this discussion is about what we're doing, isn't it? I don't
> recall seing "Colin Walters, Debian Dictator for Life" voted on
> anywhere.
Ah, you must have missed the rider in the small font in my last policy
proposal :)
Seriously, I didn't mean it that way; I just meant that I think everyone
has generally accepted that UTF-8 is the way of the future; we're just
debating when, where, and how.
> What "change programs?" That's what they do now.
I don't think most do. dpkg for example doesn't. 'ls' for example
doesn't.
> Yet your own proposal breaks compatibility with, let's see, EVERYONE?
No, for people using UTF-8 today, like me, it increases compatibility :)
And remember, (not to sound like a broken record, but) lots of upstream
software is moving to UTF-8. Compatibility with systems using legacy
charsets is already broken to some extent.
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