Re: Bug#292330: project: UTF-8 as default
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Marco d'Itri <md@Linux.IT> writes:
> rleigh@whinlatter.ukfsn.org wrote:
>
>>I think the locales package is the place to start this. For etch, I
>>would like the UTF-8 locales to be the default for all languages (with
> This would be stupid, pointless and would piss off a lot of people.
Please could you explain why?
> But since your native language is english I suppose that it may be
> hard to you to understand the reason for this.
Please could you explain why English is different?
When I made the transition myself, I had to recode a number of files
to UTF-8 from the local encoding I was using previously (ISO-8859-1).
How does this differ for other languages and encodings?
> The quantity of untagged data (especially in emails and text files) is
> so high that using UTF-8 as the default encoding is inappropriate in
> many locales.
Why? It's an undeniable fact that there is a cost associated with the
migration, but to avoid the migration will not be of long term benefit
to users of those locales. This will not affect existing
installations, only new installs, and even then will only be a
default; the "traditional" encodings will still be an option, and both
encodings can be available together.
emails without a specific charset which are not plain ASCII are most
likely broken in the first place. It's not our place to work around
that sort of breakage (it's only working by accident, and even then
only if you have a particular locale codeset selected). Text files
/are/ more of a problem. For these, we have iconv. Remember that
ultimately the whole point of the migration is to get rid of this
issue!
> This obviously does not means that UTF-8 cannot be the appropriate
> default encoding for other locales.
This goes against the general long-term plans for GNU/Linux i18n/l10n,
since UTF-8 is intended to unify the locale encodings, not to
perpetuate their mutual incompatibilities.
Regards,
Roger
- --
Roger Leigh
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