Tomohiro Kubota wrote:
> Locale-dependency is a mandatory. All text-handling softwares
> which don't obey LC_CTYPE should be regarded as buggy.
Juliusz Chroboczek writes:
> Repeating this will not make it any more true.
He is not repeating it to make it more true. He is repeating it to
make people aware that
A program cannot be considered properly internationalized
until it obeys the current locale (LC_ALL || LC_CTYPE || LANG).
The reasons are:
- LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE, LANG are specified by POSIX to have an effect
on all POSIX defined text utilities. Obviously a standard cannot
make a statement on "all programs whatsoever", but the intention
is obvious that it should apply to all programs.
- Newbies should have only a single variable to set in their
$HOME/.profile, not dozens.
- We want to make it easy for everyone to use an UTF-8 locale.
Users shouldn't be bothered to change various $HOME/.* files,
set .Xdefault resources etc.
The programs we are waiting for are:
- emacs. In an UTF-8 locale, it does not set the
keyboard-coding-system to UTF-8, thus when I type umlaut keys
strange things happen. And it does not set the default file
encoding to UTF-8, thus I see mojibake every time I open a
file which looks perfectly nice through "cat" or "vi" in xterm.
But we heard the Emacs developers are working on this lately.
- xterm. The official XFree86 version still hasn't Tomohiro's
nl_langinfo and iconv patch integrated.
- All X programs which set their default font to "*-iso8859-1"
independently of the locale. This includes nedit.
- All programs that still use gettext-0.10.35 and haven't upgraded
to gettext-0.10.38. This includes gcc-3.0.
- SuSE's installation program YaST.
- Motif. Its file selector box crashes the program in the presence
of UTF-8 filenames in an UTF-8 locale.
- All programs that ask the user for the encoding and store the
answer in a $HOME/.* file. This includes pine.
Tomohiro, thank you for removing 'rxvt' from the list of buggy
programs.
Bruno
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
