(moved from private conversations with Randy and Bruce)
Hello,
Currently, the unofficial UTF-8 LFS book
http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~alexander/lfs-book/
rightfully says that even very basic tasks such as viewing ID3V1 tags,
printing plain-text files from the command line, and recording
Windows-readable CDs, are not possible with the current unmodified BLFS
if UTF-8 locale is selected and the items in question contain non-ASCII
characters. For some of the issues, a fix is known. The proposal is to
decide upon the way to incorporate such fixes into BLFS (i.e., should
they be requested via blfs-dev list or Bugzilla, where in the book is
their proper place, and so on). Once this is decided, I will provide the
needed text.
I prefer using Bugzilla (so that things don't get lost) and placing
fixes directly on the page of each package that has to be fixed.
The BLFS fixes will have the form of new packages (like BEEP Media
Player) providing the missing functionality, optional patches and notes
like the following:
a2ps: This package doesn't support UTF-8 encoding of text documents. Use
Cedilla instead to print such documents from the command line.
links: This package doesn't work in UTF-8 locales, don't install it if
you use them.
nano: Stable versions of nano don't support UTF-8. Install a development
version (1.3.8) using the same instructions if you need UTF-8 support.
As you see, such new packages, patches and notes can be just ignored,
and the only downside for readers that don't use UTF-8 is some wasted
screen space. Although Bruce says that he is unable to test the changes,
this should not be an obstacle. For each change, I will provide a
testcase on request.
Also, UTF-8 support is just required for packages such as Rox Filer to
go into the book. Even such conservative distro as Debian will do UTF-8
by default in the next release, while (B)LFS will support both UTF-8 and
traditional locales. And, some LFS editors already try en_GB.UTF-8
despite the warnings :)
Matthew said that he will quite happily set up a UTF-8 branch for the
LFS book in the official LFS repository, so the unofficial status of
this fork will probably disappear soon.
--
Alexander E. Patrakov
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