Bug#99933: second attempt at more comprehensive unicode policy
>I agree that it would be a good idea to store filenames as UTF-8
>in the filesystem. But I (being a part of "everyone") do not
>agree, that we should even try to switch every terminal in the
>world to UTF-8. We do need conversion of file names somewhere
>between the filesystem level and output.
A Posix filename is a null terminated byte string (sans '/'). Any widescale conversion is
going to cause aliasing issues and other bugs, whether or not we stay Posix compatible.
Just as important, conversion is not an issue for debian-policy; linux-utf8@nl.linux.org (the
primary Unicode-Linux discussion list) is strongly against it, and I believe the people who
matter - the ones who work on the kernel and libc - are generally against it.
I'd been interpreting this part of the policy amendment as saying "You shouldn't have filenames
in packages (or created by packages) in non-UTF-8 encodings." (I'm not generally a fan of
filenames in non-ASCII UTF-8, but at least it's consistent.) If we're talking about what programs
output, it should use whatever name and encoding the user asks for. We can't dictate what
encoding end-users use; just what Debian packages use internally.
David Starner - dvdeug@debian.org
(starner@okstate.edu may be disappearing soon - dvdeug@email.ro will work,
but is not suitable for high-volume traffic.)
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