Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 02:54:43PM -0800, David Starner wrote:
> 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.
Yes, there are UTF-8 versions available. Does everyone have them? Do we
enable them by default? Do all other vendors ship them? The answer to all
of these questions is No.
> >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
Colin was advocating what amounted to exactly that. He was advocating
removing all support for non-UTF8 terminals.
> >Then we have all the other Linux distros, plus Solaris, AIX, AS/400, etc,
> >etc, etc.
>
> AS/400? We don't support EBCDIC.
AS/400s do support ASCII :-)
> >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
I was making a joke, not to be meant seriosly (and it was referring to the
AS/400)
> >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.
I don't buy that at all. Lots of programs are simply pipes, working with
data going in, echoing it back out.
Colin asserted that ls was broken because it doesn't handle Unicode. I
submit that ls has always handled Unicode; if the filename is encoded with
Unicode and your terminal is Unicode, it will show it in Unicode. It
doesn't have to be made specifically aware to just shlep some data onto the
screen.
> We can support non-UTF-8 terminals - as Radovan pointed out, the tool
Then let's do that, and not consign the rest of the world to the junk bin.
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