Bug#1026231: debian-policy: document droppage of support for legacy locales
On Sat, Jan 21, 2023 at 12:58:19PM -0800, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> writes:
> > On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 05:16:43PM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
>
> >> Sure, but neither of those actually require us to support GBK or GB
> >> 18030 as a system locale, only as something that iconv() (or whatever
> >> browsers actually use, which is probably their own thing) can convert
> >> into their preferred internal representation (which is almost certainly
> >> UTF-8, UTF-16 or UCS-4).
>
> > Those files need to be edited *somewhere*. If that somewhere is a Debian
> > desktop, then you also need editors that know how to write such files,
> > etc.
>
> Both Emacs and vim will edit files in whatever (supported) encoding you
> want, regardless of the locale encoding. I would assume this is not that
> uncommon of a feature for other editors as well. This is therefore a bit
> like Simon's web browser example (although may be somewhat less
> transparent, admittedly).
This is true but this is missing an important point: it is usually not possible
to detect the characther encoding of a plain text file.
That is where a default encoding is required.
Cheers,
--
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>
Imagine a large red swirl here.
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