On Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 10:29:21AM +1100, Jim Breen wrote: > ["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.
Many systems are local for one specific small firm, in one culture. For those environments it have worked well for decades to have /etc/passwd in the defalut system encoding. I agree we should aim at having it in UTF-8, and that date is getting closer. Kind regards Keld - Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
