At 02:32 PM 1/8/2003 -0600, John Goerzen wrote: >It's not just physical terminals we're talking about here. We're talking >about the vast majority of the state of the art terminal emulators *today*.
I'd have a hard time describing a terminal emulator that doesn't support UTF-8 as "start of the art". Recent versions of xterm, gnome-terminal, and the KDE terminal all support UTF-8. >Debian's latest stable release does not use Unicode by default in either KDE >or Gnome, AFAIK. The console in the latest stable release does not use >Unicode by default either. No one said that we were going to remove non-UTF-8 locales in Sarge. The console can be switched into UTF-8 mode with one command - unicode_start. >Then we have all the other Linux distros, plus Solaris, AIX, AS/400, etc, >etc, etc. AS/400? We don't support EBCDIC. We'll be losing more compatibility with Mastodon Linux, but we can't run a.out anymore, so it's really a moot point. As for the rest of them, most of them are ahead of us in UTF-8 support - RedHat, Solaris, AIX. What about Mac OS/X and Windows? Both of them are far ahead of us in UTF-8 handling. >Hell, we're doing good to get some things to support *ASCII*. Then those programs shouldn't be in Debian - Hamm made being 8-bit clean a release critical property. Being 8-bit clean isn't good enough for a large part of the world to use their native languages, and is a pain for the rest of us who are mathematicians, linguists, scholars or travelers. >Unicode did not exist until fairly recently. Lots of useful software was >written prior to its introduction. If it was written prior to Unicode, it's useless to the Ethiopians and the Iranians and a large part of the rest of the world; it's likely to be useless to the Japanese and Chinese as well. We can support non-UTF-8 terminals - as Radovan pointed out, the tool is filterm. If you want to support an older terminal, that's the easiest place to do so; you can't afford to muck around in kernel and libc or in every program for that. David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] ([EMAIL PROTECTED] may be disappearing soon - [EMAIL PROTECTED] will work, but is not suitable for high-volume traffic.)
