Package: debian-policy Version: 3.5.4.0 Severity: wishlist I think Debian should start to move into using UTF-8 by default everywhere.
Rationale: The current 'standard' default character set is ISO-8859-1. This works fine most of the time, however, it causes some problems. For instance, most of the documentation is in ISO-8859-1 -- except the ones which are in languages that need another charset. If a user is fluent in two languages which needs incompatible charsets, he would have to keep switching charsets all the time. To avoid this, a single charset which works for all languages should be used by default. Using UTF-8 by default in Debian would also have the added side benefit of forcing all programs to properly handle variable-length multibyte charsets. It could also be possible to add an UTF-8 encoded version for all locales (could be a simple matter of changing the commented defaults in the list of locales). Having a single charset means that people using wildly different charsets could be able to read/edit the same text files without having to recode them. Using UTF-8 in the name of files means that nobody's file name would look like gibberish for someone else just because the charsets being used are different. Last but not least, someone has to take the lead and be the first to do it. Debian has done it before in things like consistent keyboard handling. The structure of Debian makes it the ideal place to initiatives which touch a lot of things like this one. For people who aren't using UTF-8, if /usr/doc is consistently coded in UTF8, it'd be possible to use Apache tricks to force its enconding as UTF-8 when viewed using the http://localhost/doc/ default URL. -- System Information Debian Release: testing/unstable Architecture: i386 Kernel: Linux flower 2.4.5 #1 Tue May 29 18:09:30 BRT 2001 i686 Locale: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1, LC_CTYPE=C Versions of packages debian-policy depends on: ii fileutils 4.1-2 GNU file management utilities.
