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Bug#292330: use UTF-8 by default



On Sat, Jun 16, 2007 at 05:48:00PM +0100, martin f krafft wrote:
> also sprach Thorsten Glaser <tg@mirbsd.de> [2007.06.16.1528 +0100]:
> > That's what I did, but the idea is not to have to do that. (Besides,
> > "C" is installed by default, so we need some kind of "C.UTF-8", whose
> > role is – for LC_CTYPE – usually fulfilled by en_US.UTF-8.)
> 
> Please stop CCing debian-project.
> 
> Does a C.UTF-8 exist? If yes, then this is a sound proposal,
> I think.

  it's not. We could create a neutral.utf-8 locale for sure, but a
C.utf-8 is really bad, because some programs check the locale for 'C'
and when they foind that use hand optimized functions to replace the
localized libc ones. And thanks to POSIX, even if it looks gross, it's
totally OK to do that.

  C charset is and should be ascii, that's an assumption you should not
break. In fact, using an 8bit locale would often not harm, but a
multi-byte one would be really really bad (as you would end up with e.g.
strings split in the middle of a point code, *brrr* you definitely don't
want that).

  in d-i it's ok to use C.utf-8 as the amount of programs running with
that locale is definitely small and manageable. In a debian system ? no,
it's definitely a _bad_ idea.
-- 
·O·  Pierre Habouzit
··O                                                madcoder@debian.org
OOO                                                http://www.madism.org

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