On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 11:58, Denis Barbier wrote: > On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 10:23:14AM -0500, Colin Walters wrote: > [...] > > It looks to me like at this point almost everyone agrees with the > > content of my proposal in #99933, and we are discussing implementation > > details. Agreed? > > No. We agree that UTF-8 support must be dramatically improved, but > legacy encodings must be supported too.
Sure...but remember that my policy proposal does not drop support for legacy charsets; in fact it recommends that programs try falling back to them if UTF-8 decoding fails. I see this policy proposal as a strong statement that Debian is moving towards Unicode, not as a means to get packages which don't grok UTF-8 removed from Debian or something silly like that. Implicitly in this is that we will support legacy encodings to some extent for a while. Do you agree? > I was unclear, and only speaking about files shipped by Debian packages > which contain non-ASCII characters without specifying their encoding. Ok. > Users can do whatever they want with their data. Agreed completely. They can have their data in any encoding they want, as long as it's UTF-8. :) (just kidding...) > I have almost txt, man and info pages in mind. IIRC *BSD put man pages > under .../man/<language>.<encoding>/, don't they? Info pages are never > translated. The only text files with non-ASCII letters I encounter > are documentation and can be safely renamed, but maybe there are others. Ah, OK. I think that improving how our documentation formats specify charsets is a great goal. I misunderstood your proposal. > > but instead we could add support to programs to autodetect the charset > > semi-intelligently from file content, which is what programs like Emacs > > in the real world do today. > > Then why do you patch dpkg to support UTF-8 input if it can guess encoding? Er...my patch was to support outputting UTF-8 to the user's terminal. There was no input involved. I think you may have confused something somewhere, but maybe I just wasn't clear about what it does...
