Peter Memishian wrote: > > What happens if a user wants to name an interface using characters that > > aren't in 7-bit US-ASCII? Is that even possible? > > Link names can only contain the characters listed in the NOTES section of > of dlpi(7P). > > -- > meem
OK, I see. I think that should change. Maybe not as part of UV, but eventually I can see pressure to change it. In this day and age, there's no reason to not allow someone in China, Japan, Russia, or any other county where the primary language does not use a Latin alphabet to name interfaces in their own language. I've seen (and attempted to use) Microsoft's Japanese language version of Windows. Everything is in Japanese (thankfully, the UI is laid out the same way it is in English language version so I could stumble through doing simple things even though I don't know any Japanese). If you get a command line, all the commands (notepad, copy, format, etc.) are still in English, but they accepted Japanese characters for things like filenames (and I believe even volume names for disks). While the DLPI spec probably doesn't allow such a thing (I don't know, I'm not that familiar with it), we could add a shim layer to handle conversions. For example, consider International Domain Names and ACE form (http://devedge-temp.mozilla.org/viewsource/2003/idn/index_en.html). China's economy is growing. Japan's economy shows signs of leaving the doldrums and growing again. English has not always been the language of international business and diplomacy. Before it was French, and before that Latin. There's no guarantee that English will stay the dominant language of business and diplomacy (and of course, no guarantee that the future will bring change in this area). Again, I don't know if this is something we should tackle as part of UV, but it is something we need to keep in mind. Times change, and the limitations in the DLPI man page seem outdated to me. Dan
