Thaddeus H. Black wrote: > However, the typical roster of skills one masters in contributing > broadly to Debian development is already awesome: C, C++, CPP, Make, > Perl, Python, Autoconf, CVS, Shell, Glibc, System calls, /proc, IPC, > sockets, Sed, Awk, Vi, Emacs, locales, Libdb, GnuPG, Readline, Ncurses, > TeX, Postscript, Groff, XML, assembly, Flex, Bison, ORB, Lisp, Dpkg, > PAM, Xlibs, Tk, GTK, SysVInit, Debconf, ELF, etc.---not to mention the > use of the English language at a sophisticated technical level.
Pardon me, but I only know 18 of the 40 items you mentioned, but I don't have a problem writing software for Debian or Linux in general. (Some) developers having to learn (parts of) Unicode is not a _general_ problem, not the least because many already know it. It might be a problem for _you_in_particular_, because you do not know it and don't want to learn it. But that isn't a very good argument against applying a perhaps somewhat complex technology to Debian that's well suited for the job. Especially since many tools that today can't handle multibyte encodings (UTF-8/Unicode in particular) yet, will _have_to_ support it at some time in the future anyway. BTW, the understanding of Unicode isn't required for most tools, mostly the understanding of UTF-8 is sufficient, and UTF-8 is trivial. > UTF-8 is neat, but I do not really like Unicode (you may have noticed > this). You might like Bytext[1] better then. SCNR ;-) Seriously, I get the impression you don't like Unicode because _you_ don't need it. > Seeking essential simplicity, I would prefer to keep the full hairy > overgrown Unicode standard from the typical Debian roster of development > skills. Wouldn't you? No, I wouldn't. References: 1. http://www.bytext.org