Bug#1026231: debian-policy: document droppage of support for legacy locales
On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 03:57:17PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:47:42AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > Preferring to use Unicode does seem to be the direction that all of
> > computing is going in, as a simplifying assumption - for example W3C
> > advice for HTML is "You should always use the UTF-8 character encoding"[1]
> > - and as we know, things that aren't tested usually don't work. So I
> > think the level of functionality for non-UTF-8 locales and encodings in
> > the software we package is going to decline over time, whether Debian
> > wants it to or not.
>
> If the world's most populous country uses something that is not UTF-8, I
> think it's safe to say it's being tested, if only by people who will
> file bugs when things go awry.
And we do know there's not a single bug filed with a GB* locale within the
last 12 years.
There's far fewer reports from Chinese people than the population would
indicate: 0.75% of those with locale information, but that's still 3241
reports; I find it implausible that there's a non-negligible number of
users that go with GB* yet not a single of them gave a single bit of
feedback.
> If the PRC government *requires* a non-UTF-8 encoding for things sold to
> them, we would be doing our users who want to sell a product containing
> Debian to the PRC government a disservice by dropping support for it
> altogether.
It appears to me they require the character _set_ but not encoding: ie,
that all glyphs can be displayed, they can be entered from keyboard, etc.
The standard talks a lot about font support, etc.
> We don't have to ensure it works perfectly out of the box; just that
> support is achievable with a reasonable amount of work.
Our installer doesn't allow choosing such a locale, thus if indeed the
encoding not character set is legally required, then we'd need to change
so before the release.
But I don't expect that to be the case -- a few years ago I played with
Deepin and don't remember any weird encoding being used. It would be good
to either check again, or ask one of their maintainers.
But for now, I gotta run.
Meow!
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Let's make a Debian conference in Yalta, Ukraine.
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
Reply to: