Bruce Dubbs wrote:
> In some non-list traffic, there has been some discussion of UTF-8 for
> {,B}LFS. I'm posting this discussion to the wider community for comments.
>
> The question is: should {,B}LFS support UTF-8? If so, who will be
> responsible for the UTF-8 specific portions of the books and how should
> the material be presented?
I've always been in favor of making the LFS book 'UTF-8 ready'. I
supported Alex in his first attempt - which resulted in a partial
solution via the console bootscripts - and I continue to support what he
is doing with the UTF-8 fork (or whatever the official phrase is).
It seems to me that this is as much a political question as a technical
one. LFS is a global effort, despite its origins in the
Canadian-Nederlander past, and has taken contributions and enthusiasm
from many quarters, admitedly mainly from those who can join-in in
English. I note names that are clearly East Asian, as well as those
using St Cyrill's Fonts. It seems somewhat imperialist to ignore a
technology that could widen the project's inclusivity among those using
different characters - most especially Cyrillic, Chinese and Arabic.
However, that we need here is a framework that allows us all the work
from the same base. Not a Universal-LFS where everything works out of
the box in every character set in the known universe. The only people
who can validate, or even develop, a solution for their language are
native readers. The aim has to be to get the infrastructure support
technology right, not the detailed implementation. UTF-8 seems to be
the right balance, and I think, therefore that UTF-8 should become the
LFS baseline (in trunk) as some near date.
This implies that BLFS needs to change a little too, but as Alex says,
this is more to do with informed user's making sensible selections,
rather than throwing out perfectly good packages that just don't happen
to work with UTF-8 locales (or even with UTF-8 enabled systems) - there
may well be some packages we should add that ONLY work in Chinese or
Japanese in the longer term (we may be asked to do this by new friends,
and we should be open to that idea). I emphasise though that this needs
to be driven by those who can validate it, not by expecting Randy and
Bruce and the rest of us to understand how Chinese syntax works (I can
do Japanese at a pinch, though).
R.
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