Bug#584801: problem with German umlaut

[pacman@kosh.dhis.org]

Harald Dunkel writes:
> 
> Is this a special xterm feature? "whois sensors.de" works much better
> with -k8. Would you suggest to make -k8 the default?

In a perfect world, it would be unnecessary since you wouldn't have
anything written on your terminal that wasn't in the proper charset.

In the real world, where the average xterm user runs dozens if not
hundreds of tools which write unvalidated data to the terminal (on
stdout or stderr), and few if any tools that use 8-bit control
characters, -k8 as default would be a good idea.

|4.  Internationalisation
|
|   The WHOIS protocol has not been internationalised.  The WHOIS
|   protocol has no mechanism for indicating the character set in use.
|   Originally, the predominant text encoding in use was US-ASCII.  In
|   practice, some WHOIS servers, particularly those outside the USA,
|   might be using some other character set either for requests, replies,
|   or both.  This inability to predict or express text encoding has
|   adversely impacted the interoperability (and, therefore, usefulness)
|   of the WHOIS protocol.

-- 
Alan Curry