Anthony Fok <f...@debian.org> writes: > I'm not asking you to spend any time working on GB18030; that would be > the job of Debian Chinese i18n/L10n team as well as the wider community > (glibc, libiconv, Qt, etc.) All I am asking you is to maintain the > status quo, and don't discount anything other than UTF-8 as legacy.
This topic comes up a lot, and I'd love to put something in either Policy or the Developer's Reference proactively to at least explain what we know about what our users need and to point people at the right questions to ask if it's been another decade and they want to standardize on UTF-8 again. Do you have an idea of something suitable we should say? I do think we probably should say more *somewhere* about making UTF-8 the default choice in most situations if you otherwise have no reason to choose anything specific. For example, as you point out, files written in Chinese for Chinese people may or may not want to use UTF-8, but at this point I do think anything written in, say, French or German probably should just use UTF-8. Also, file names in the file system shipped in Debian packages probably should use UTF-8 since there's no way to declare the character set and there are some solid reasons for picking one and sticking with it. (Obviously, users can create files with any character set they want.) > Debian already supports GB 18030-2000 (or GB 18030-2005) rather well. How do I configure a locale that uses this as the default character set? I'd like to be able to test this configuration (at least for my own packages), but since recent changes to locales it doesn't appear to be an option in debconf and I was confused trying to figure out how I should make it work. -- Russ Allbery (r...@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
