["H. Peter Anvin" (Re: encoding of /etc/passwd) writes:] >> By author: Markus Kuhn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> > 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.
I totally agree with Markus. Having /etc/passwd, etc. locale dependent is a recipe for a mess, made worse by some software dipping into it for user identification, etc. It's a bit like DNS; until it can get to an agreed international coding it should stay with ISO 646 IRV. BTW, many sysadmins turn chfn off. Jim -- Jim Breen [[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/] Computer Science & Software Engineering, Tel: +61 3 9905 3298 P.O Box 26, Monash University, Fax: +61 3 9905 5146 Clayton VIC 3800, Australia $B%8%`!&%V%j!<%s(B@$B%b%J%7%eBg3X(B - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
