Re: Emacs and UTF-8 locale

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <tkubota@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

At Fri, 21 Dec 2001 18:06:06 +0000,
Markus Kuhn wrote:

> Another example for why using "nl_langinfo(CODESET)" or "locale charmap"
> is far better than looking at the environment variables with obscure
> rules:
> 
> On many systems, the locale "de_DE" (and others) will soon have to
> change the charmap from "ISO-8859-1" to "ISO-8859-15". At least 12 of
> the pre-euro locales will become obsolete in 11 days from now (people on
> the continent received already their first euro coins this week to
> practice). The mapping between locale names and encodings should really
> be left to where it belongs, namely the C library.

It is true that softwares should use nl_langinfo(CODESET) as far as
possible than looking at the environment variables.  However, there 
are platforms which don't support nl_langinfo() such as FreeBSD.
Thus, portable softwares should check environment variables when
nl_langinfo() is not available, though this method can result in
wrong encoding.  This is a discussion from softwares' viewpoint.

>From users' viewpoint, to declare encoding more clearly, it is a good
idea to define LANG variable including codeset part.  Especially for
Euro-migrating countries.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@xxxxxxxxxx>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/