"Maiorana, Jason" wrote on 2002-11-25 17:55 UTC: > Anyway, the original question was why *Red Hat* decided not to ship > utf-8 on by default for those locales. I was imagining that there must be some > technical reason, because despite its drawbacks, utf-8 is still much > more advantageous, so political sensitivity alone doesnt seem reason > enough...
Another question is, why did RH8 switch to UTF-8 by default for everyone else already. Even though UTF-8 support has improved dramatically over the last few months (Emacs 21, perl 5.8, bash), in practice still a lot of widely used applications are not ready for it and will case user dissatisfaction. A2ps and pine come to mind as important examples used at this place. Perhaps Linux distribution developers in the US who do not have a single non-ASCII key on their keyboards underestimated the consequences of this switchover. On the other hand, I have by no means any objections against forcing the issue a bit, especially in the countries where most Linux application developers are located. The Linux community has never shied away from radical changes that break lots of old installations in the interest of what is eventually a far better system (ELF, glibc, etc.). So UTF-8 is just the next major improvement to the Linux platform that will cause a bit of a temporary headache here and there. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/> -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
