On 31 Oct 2001 09:49:21 -0800 "H. Peter Anvin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
HPA> > Global files such as /etc/*, /usr/include/*, etc. obviously *must* remain HPA> > in a locale invariant encoding. This is today ISO 646 IRV (US-ASCII). HPA> > Hopefully it will one day become UTF-8. ISO 8859-1 has no place in HPA> > /etc/passwd and similar files and should be strongly discouraged there. HPA> HPA> Excuse me, but that's ridiculous. /etc/passwd contains the names of HPA> people, and well, people usually don't care when they are named that HPA> they're going to be put into /etc/passwd. The sysadmin has very HPA> little control over this -- after all, the user can run chfn(1) and HPA> set that up directly. /etc/passwd should be typically be encoded in HPA> the system default locale. HPA> HPA> In practice, as all of this painfully illustrates, is that multiple HPA> encodings in anything but an isolated environment is ultimately HPA> futile. Whereas data in a lot of contexts can be labelled, stuff that HPA> is "around the system in general" -- may it be usernames, filenames, HPA> /etc/passwd, etc, are ultimately have to be encoded in the encoding HPA> specified by the system default locale, and the goal is for that to HPA> become UTF-8. Excuse me, what a mess that would create! How would you know which encoding /etc/passwd is in? What if you have both Japanese and Russian users on your system? UTF-8 is the only candidate. You can use iconv to convert user's input to UTF-8. Regards, Nerijus - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
