(Please CC me, I'm not subscribed to bug-standards).
John Darrington wrote:
* ASCII is a well defined standard, and all ASCII is UTF-8 (but the
converse is not true).
* The command iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII file will fail unless all the
characters in file are already ASCII. Hence it isn't a very useful
command.
* The coding standards say that we should prefer ASCII wherever
possible. If it is not possible, then we should use UTF-8.
I think that Therese is saying that there are some files which are using
UTF-8 when ASCII would have sufficed.
Thanks. This is exactly what I meant. (Thérèse forwarded my question
from webmasters to this list).
ASCII is the common subset of both UTF-8 and most single-byte charsets,
specially ISO-8859-X. Coding 'maintain.txt' and 'maintain.info' in pure
ASCII (as was done until some time ago) makes them backwards compatible
with almost all machines and OSs at no cost.
This is specially important for 'maintain.info' because it can't be
converted (the tag table becomes incorrect). Any user of a single-byte
terminal will need to rebuild 'maintain.info' from source (as I need to
do to see it in one of my machines).
Best regards,
Antonio.
