Re: advantages and disadvantages of local/lang en_CA.UTF-8?
On 6/5/07, Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
I'm in Canada speaking and writing English with a off-the-shelf North
American computer with a standard US keyboard.
Up until etch, lang was C and nothing was UTF. What are the advantages
to me of etch setting a default language en_CA.UTF-8 and other locale
settings? What are the disadvantages?
The advantages are that UTF-8 can handle all characters in Unicode,
not just ASCII. That might not be to big a deal for your situation, but
it can still be somewhat useful. For example, you might happen to
download a file with characters from outside the ASCII range.
The other advantage is that everything that isn't UTF-8 already is moving
towards it. Sooner or later you'll probably have very little choice about
using it.
I don't know of any major disadvantages, and I know of only a few minor
disadvantages such as the issue you mention below.
The only one I've hit so far is if I ssh into the box from a box that
doesn't have locales, I have to issue a LANG=C before I run mc or mutt.
Ideas?
I think you can make an entry in ~/.ssh/config to automatically pass
LANG=C to specific hosts that can't use UTF-8.
Cheers,
Kelly
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