Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
At 02:32 PM 1/8/2003 -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
>It's not just physical terminals we're talking about here. We're talking
>about the vast majority of the state of the art terminal emulators *today*.
I'd have a hard time describing a terminal emulator that doesn't support
UTF-8 as "start of the art". Recent versions of xterm, gnome-terminal,
and the KDE terminal all support UTF-8.
>Debian's latest stable release does not use Unicode by default in either KDE
>or Gnome, AFAIK. The console in the latest stable release does not use
>Unicode by default either.
No one said that we were going to remove non-UTF-8 locales in Sarge. The
console can be switched into UTF-8 mode with one command - unicode_start.
>Then we have all the other Linux distros, plus Solaris, AIX, AS/400, etc,
>etc, etc.
AS/400? We don't support EBCDIC.
We'll be losing more compatibility with Mastodon Linux, but we can't run a.out
anymore, so it's really a moot point. As for the rest of them, most of them
are ahead of us in UTF-8 support - RedHat, Solaris, AIX. What about Mac
OS/X and Windows? Both of them are far ahead of us in UTF-8 handling.
>Hell, we're doing good to get some things to support *ASCII*.
Then those programs shouldn't be in Debian - Hamm made being 8-bit
clean a release critical property. Being 8-bit clean isn't good enough for
a large part of the world to use their native languages, and is a pain for
the rest of us who are mathematicians, linguists, scholars or travelers.
>Unicode did not exist until fairly recently. Lots of useful software was
>written prior to its introduction.
If it was written prior to Unicode, it's useless to the Ethiopians and the Iranians and
a large part of the rest of the world; it's likely to be useless to the Japanese and
Chinese as well.
We can support non-UTF-8 terminals - as Radovan pointed out, the tool
is filterm. If you want to support an older terminal, that's
the easiest place to do so; you can't afford to muck around
in kernel and libc or in every program for that.
David Starner - starner@okstate.edu
(starner@okstate.edu may be disappearing soon - dvdeug@email.ro will work,
but is not suitable for high-volume traffic.)
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