Re: Linux Distros w/o UTF-8 Locales

[Simos Xenitellis <simos74@xxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 11:18, Christopher Fynn wrote:
> Roger Leigh wrote:
> 
> > Please do file bugs against the relevant Debian packages.  I would
> > like to see this happen, but there is resistance to changing even the
> > default at installation time.  Please see
> 
> > http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/01/msg00315.html
> 
> Since some Linux distros already install UTF-8 by default one can
> always monitor the support lists for those distributions to see
> whether or not this change causes users a lot of problems as
> these people fear.

In general there are no significant problems. Distros such as Fedora
choose Unicode and UTF-8 by default it it all looks well.

There is a Wiki page that collects problematic UTF-8 applications, at
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fBadSoftware
The list needs combing as several of the issues have been fixed. Any
takers?

There is also a page on problematic Unicode applications that support up
to the BMP, at
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fBMP_2dOnly

UTF-8 is on the screens of Ubuntu for the next release, 
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UTFEightByDefault
Problems are listed at
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UTFEightCurrentProblems
Migration path at
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UTFEightMigrationTool

Personally, weighting in the advantages of UTF-8, I would not see any
showstoppers here. In effect, as iso-8859-1 is the same to utf-8
(encoded as 1 byte), there core users of English are generally not
affected.

Some difficult tasks include:
1. LaTeX by design uses 8-bit characters and appears difficult to
work-around.
There is a utf8 package that supports a list of languages, however it's
not full Unicode support. Status of Omega?
Is LaTeX important anymore?
2. The Linux console as is can display Unicode (latin-based languages,
greek, cyrillic only) and input is ok if no dead keys (accents) are
involved. Thus, it's limited. The proper solution is to write a specific
terminal emulation program that runs on the framebuffer (see
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=143014)
Will users want to use the console anyomore?

Simos


--
Linux-UTF8:   i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive:      http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/