Re: question on Linux UTF8 support

[Danilo Segan <dsegan@xxxxxxx>]

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/