Hello,
The UTF-8 book has been updated. The main change is addition of text
about mounting filesystems with Windows origin, such as FAT and SMBFS.
From now on, I don't see any substantial possible improvements, and see
no value in delaying the merge. The patch against the current SVN is at:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~alexander/patches/lfs_book-r7233-utf8-1.patch
The rendered book is at:
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~alexander/lfs-book/
The patched book (unlike certain distros) still supports old 8-bit
locales, and when such locale is selected, it is almost fully compatible
with BLFS (exception: Mutt segfaults at startup, solved by upgrading
Mutt to 1.5.10). The patched book also brings missing bits of UTF-8
support to many packages, and explains how to set up UTF-8 on Linux
console and how to view translated manual pages. All of this can be seen
on the latest pre-release of the LFS LiveCD, which is built according to
the patched book:
http://ftp.lfs-matrix.net/pub/lfs-livecd/lfslivecd-x86-6.2-pre2.iso
UTF-8 is _still_ not fully supported (e.g. 'tr :upper: :lower:' works
only on ASCII characters, 'watch' shows only ASCII characters, 'sfdisk'
misaligns button labels in non-English UTF-8 locales), but the same bugs
exist in all distros (including those which claim that they support only
UTF-8). Because of that, such bugs should not be an obstacle.
A more important issue is that the patched book is no longer compatible
with the current BLFS when the user selects some UTF-8 locale. But
that's a BLFS problem, and BLFS people won't fix this until my patch
gets merged into LFS. The only known solution to this incompatibility is
to add notes on the pages of non-working packages (so that UTF-8 users
avoid installation of those packages), because such incompatibilities
will not be fixed upstream soon. The remaining packages, as can be seen
on the LiveCD, still form a usable set.
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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