On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 03:57:17PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote: > On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:47:42AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > > Preferring to use Unicode does seem to be the direction that all of > > computing is going in, as a simplifying assumption - for example W3C > > advice for HTML is "You should always use the UTF-8 character encoding"[1] > > - and as we know, things that aren't tested usually don't work. So I > > think the level of functionality for non-UTF-8 locales and encodings in > > the software we package is going to decline over time, whether Debian > > wants it to or not. > > If the world's most populous country uses something that is not UTF-8, I > think it's safe to say it's being tested, if only by people who will > file bugs when things go awry.
And we do know there's not a single bug filed with a GB* locale within the last 12 years. There's far fewer reports from Chinese people than the population would indicate: 0.75% of those with locale information, but that's still 3241 reports; I find it implausible that there's a non-negligible number of users that go with GB* yet not a single of them gave a single bit of feedback. > If the PRC government *requires* a non-UTF-8 encoding for things sold to > them, we would be doing our users who want to sell a product containing > Debian to the PRC government a disservice by dropping support for it > altogether. It appears to me they require the character _set_ but not encoding: ie, that all glyphs can be displayed, they can be entered from keyboard, etc. The standard talks a lot about font support, etc. > We don't have to ensure it works perfectly out of the box; just that > support is achievable with a reasonable amount of work. Our installer doesn't allow choosing such a locale, thus if indeed the encoding not character set is legally required, then we'd need to change so before the release. But I don't expect that to be the case -- a few years ago I played with Deepin and don't remember any weird encoding being used. It would be good to either check again, or ask one of their maintainers. But for now, I gotta run. Meow! -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Let's make a Debian conference in Yalta, Ukraine. ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋⠀ ⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀
