Is the time ripe now to streamline the entire UTF-8 business with the
console? UTF-8 is now much more of a mainstream thing than it was a year
ago.
STEP 1: make UTF-8 the default for both the display and the
keyboard driver and make it an official convention that
from version 2.7 kernel functions can use UTF-8 in their
boot messages.
STEP 2: make UTF-8 the only encoding supported by the console,
that is disable the ESC % @ control function to leave
UTF-8 mode. One state less (character encoding) means one
step closer towards a more robust and easy to use environment
and one thing less to misconfigure. [People who really want to
use some 8-bit encoding on the console still can do this
perfectly with something like "luit" or "screen".]
I've not been in touch with the kernel/console community for many years.
Can those that are sound whether any of the above would be politically
feasible?
It seems clear that unicode_{start,stop} and the possibility of having
the keyboard and display in potentially different encodings (one
switched via ESC sequences, the other switched via ioctl()) are really
not desireable long-term solutions. When will we fix it?
Markus
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Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
--
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
