On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Alexander Voropay wrote: > Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > >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. > > > It is possible to encode strings in global files into *locale-independent* format > as MIME RFC-2047, like MIME-encoded headers in ALL modern e-mail > (with any Charsets, even UTF-8 ;). So, MUA could take this strings as-is. > > To: =?utf-8?B?0LXRg9GL0LU=?=
Changing all programs that read global files to handle MIME base 64, which is neither human readable nor technically justifyable here (as there is no email transparency requirement) is *far* more work and breaks *far* more things than changing everything to UTF-8. MIME clearly is no solution here. Stick with ASCII for the moment, upgrade to UTF-8 when the time comes. 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/
