Colin Walters <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> Then your solution is broken. Seriously, this would be a huge problem >> for many people. > > But the current situation is *already* broken! For example, for a
I don't disagree. I'm saying that your solution is worse than the problem. > Chinese person, an ISO-8859-1 system simply cannot encode, nor display, > their language. I am aware that for people entrenched in legacy True. However, if the terminal only supports ISO-8859-1, there's no way to make it magically display Chinese characters. It's a limitation, and Unicode or not, there is no way around it. > charsets like ISO-8859-1, the transition may introduce > incompatibilities. But that's the price we pay to eventually make > everything work for everyone. "may introduct incompatibilities" is something of an understatement. "Break compatibility with 50 years' worth of computing and almost every other vendor" is more accurate. >> I am vehemently opposed to any proposal that renders Debian >> substantially unusable on existing ASCII/latin1 terminals. I think it >> is great to use Unicode internally, but we clearly are not pursuing >> the right path if we introduce such breakage. > > It is the only path to the future. Note that in my proposal, I do I do not buy that for one minute. Surely it is possible to translate things back to a character set the terminal actually supports? Is that not why we have the "@UTF8" designator for our LANG settings? Perhaps you mean "it is EASIEST to break compatibility." That may be true. That is also the wrong motivation. > suggest that programs try to re-encode from UTF-8 back to the user's > locale charset.
