Bug#99324: Default charset should be UTF-8
On 30-May-01, 22:25 (CDT), Cesar Eduardo Barros <cesarb@nitnet.com.br> wrote:
> On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 01:11:58PM +1000, Anthony Towns wrote:
> > On Wed, May 30, 2001 at 11:11:20PM -0300, Cesar Eduardo Barros wrote:
> > > I think Debian should start to move into using UTF-8 by default everywhere.
> >
> > What, exactly, does this involve?
>
> - Making sure everything works with UTF-8 charset
Does this mean, for example, that cron and crontab would have to be
recoded to support wide or multibyte characters? If so, I object to
making this a requirement. That's an unreasonable burden to put on a
maintainer, and cron is basically unmaintained upstream. (Hell, cron
isn't even ISO C!). I suspect there are several core packages that in
more-or-less the same boat: widely used legacy packages that haven't
changed much in several years, and are so full of assumptions about the
text being single-byte that they'd be easier to recode from scratch.
I also wonder about the performance impact, and the size impact
(although I understand that UTF-8 uses single byte for ascii equivalent,
so that shouldn't be much, right?)
Now, I agree that encouraging such behaviour might be a good idea (I don't
know enough about various encoding to argue one over the other...)
Steve
--
Steve Greenland <stevegr@debian.org>
Reply to: