Bug#522776: debian-policy: mandate existence of a standardised UTF-8 locale
+ Steve Langasek (Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:09:17 -0700):
> On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 05:33:35PM +0000, Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> > > If you need a specific locale (as seems from "mksh", not
> > > sure if it is a bug in that program), you need to set it.
> > You can only set a locale on a glibc-based system if it’s
> > installed beforehand, which root needs to do.
> You can build-depend on the locales package and generate the locales you
> want locally, using LOCPATH to reference them. There's no need for Debian
> to guarantee the presence of a particular locale ahead of time -
It is my impression that more packages than mksh could use an UTF-8
locale at build time (I’m afraid I don’t have pointers, but I’m sure
I’ve come across at least a couple).
Wouldn’t it be just better to change Debian’s default to make an UTF-8
locale available by default, rather than to force all those packages to
play tricks with LOCPATH?
I would go as far as suggesting that some package like libc6 itself
ships the locale, both as a way of ensuring it’ll always be there, and
of not forcing the locales package on every system (not sure if this was
part of your concerns).
Unfortunately, and from my limited knowledge and recent poking of this,
it seems the supported locales for a running system are kept in a single
file (/usr/lib/locale/locale-archive), so I’m unsure how the above could
work out, if at all.
> particularly one that isn't actually useful to end users, as C.UTF-8 would
> be.
Is that point really important? It is useful for building some packages,
plus I’m sure we have pedant enough users that would prefer C.UTF-8 over
en_US.UTF-8. :-P
Finally, this stuff that Roger proposes about making “C” be UTF-8, and
create some C.ASCII for people needing that, sounds shocking at the same
time as appealing.
Cheers,
--
- Are you sure we're good?
- Always.
-- Rory and Lorelai
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