Bug#522776: debian-policy: mandate existence of a standardised UTF-8 locale

["Giacomo A. Catenazzi" <cate@debian.org>]

Thorsten Glaser wrote:
> Albert Cahalan dixit:
>
> > Unless plain "C" goes UTF-8
>
> Not going to happen, it’s not binary-safe. (I fought that in
> MirBSD with the OPTU-8/16 encoding scheme.)

Why not? Note that usual functions work on bytes, not on characters, and 
on POSIX utilities the old/classical options work on bytes by default. 
POSIX introduced new options for characters. E.g. the -c in 'wc' means 
really bytes, not characters (which is given by -m). Not so logical, but
compatible with the expected old behaviour.

POSIX was discussing if is is "legal" to have a UTF-8 POSIX/C locale.
IIRC the doubts was about the language in the standard, not about real 
problems. OTOH they acknowledged that real bugs could appear.

OTOH I use by default the UTF-8 locale, because I don't expect that 
Debian will corrupt my data. And I think system utilities will do
the right things with locale.


I start to think that moving C to UTF-8 will be the real simpler and
faster way to *hide* most of the encoding bugs.

ciao
	cate