Hi Bruno, Today at 17:24, Bruno Haible wrote:
> This will mess up users who have their LC_CTYPE set to a non-UTF-8 encoding. > It is weird if a user, in an application, enters a new file name "Süß", > and then in a terminal, the filename appears as "Süà " (wow, it even > hangs my xterm!). Oh, indeed. But what about user deciding to change LC_CTYPE? Or even worse, what if administrator provides some dirs for the user in an encoding different from the one user wants to use? Eg. imagine having a global "/Müsik" in ISO-8859-1, and user desires to use UTF-8 or ISO-8859-5. Now not only that it will be weird (and possibly even hang your xterm!), you'd be in a mess if you try to fix it. My point is that the filesystem encoding should be filesystem-wide (not per-user), because that's the only way to warrant that it won't break. And in the sense of POSIX API, UTF-8 makes most sense as a single, backwards compatible filesystem encoding (well, it wasn't originally called "UTF-FS" for no reason :), which can work for everybody. > It is just as bad as those old Motif applications which assume that > everything is ISO-8859-1. This makes these applications useless in UTF-8 > locales. No, it's not. UTF-8 can encode all characters, so you'd be able to use whatever characters you wish, give or take a conversion step. ISO-8859-1 limits you not only on "implementation details" step, but also on features. > In summary, I'd suggest > - that ALL application follow LC_ALL/LC_CTYPE/LANG, like POSIX specifies, > - that users switch to UTF-8 locale when they want. That's not closer to ever solving the problem. It's status quo. I think we should at least recommend improvements, if not require them (and nobody suggested requiring them). Basically, my recommendation was to set LC_CTYPE to UTF-8 on all new systems. Cheers, Danilo -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
