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

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

On 03.09.2010 01:46, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Samuel Thibault<sthibault@debian.org>  writes:
>
> > Well, it's mostly
>
> > - some people saying "it's useless",
> > - while other people saying "I need it",
>
> > and also
>
> > - "en_US.UTF-8 is just fine" vs.
> > - "en_US.UTF-8 sucks, we really need C.UTF-8 instead"
>
> > without any convergence.
>
> I think the way to get past that is to make a specific proposal.
>
> With my Lintian maintainer hat on, I need a UTF-8 locale that's guaranteed
> to always be available.  Right now, we're doing something complicated and
> annoying (and fragile on Ubuntu) to generate one on the fly (en_US.UTF-8
> just because it's probably always there), and we would love to stop doing
> that.
>
> I agree with others in this thread that having a UTF-8 locale without the
> collation changes implied by en_US is very useful for various software
> packages such as automated test suites that want reproducible results and
> were originally written for the C locale.

BTW I think we should wait some more time. Last week I was on 
debian-glibc list a bug: printf fails if it find an invalid UTF-8
character (when the locale uses UTF-8). Note it is allowed in POSIX,
which distinguish raw strings and parts which uses locale definitions.
So I don't think a C.UTF-8 is safe.
But a good release goal for squeeze+1.

ciao
	cate