Followup to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
By author: Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
In newsgroup: linux.utf8
>
> On Tue, 30 Oct 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> > Changing your locale to utf-8 will *not* for instance change the
> > actual encoding of /etc/password to utf-8 : it's still in iso-latin-1 or
> > whatever.
>
> Global files such as /etc/*, /usr/include/*, etc. obviously *must* remain
> in a locale invariant encoding. This is today ISO 646 IRV (US-ASCII).
> Hopefully it will one day become UTF-8. ISO 8859-1 has no place in
> /etc/passwd and similar files and should be strongly discouraged there.
>
Excuse me, but that's ridiculous. /etc/passwd contains the names of
people, and well, people usually don't care when they are named that
they're going to be put into /etc/passwd. The sysadmin has very
little control over this -- after all, the user can run chfn(1) and
set that up directly. /etc/passwd should be typically be encoded in
the system default locale.
In practice, as all of this painfully illustrates, is that multiple
encodings in anything but an isolated environment is ultimately
futile. Whereas data in a lot of contexts can be labelled, stuff that
is "around the system in general" -- may it be usernames, filenames,
/etc/passwd, etc, are ultimately have to be encoded in the encoding
specified by the system default locale, and the goal is for that to
become UTF-8.
-hpa
--
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> at work, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
