On Sat, 2005-02-19 at 11:18, Christopher Fynn wrote: > Roger Leigh wrote: > > > Please do file bugs against the relevant Debian packages. I would > > like to see this happen, but there is resistance to changing even the > > default at installation time. Please see > > > http://lists.debian.org/debian-project/2005/01/msg00315.html > > Since some Linux distros already install UTF-8 by default one can > always monitor the support lists for those distributions to see > whether or not this change causes users a lot of problems as > these people fear.
In general there are no significant problems. Distros such as Fedora choose Unicode and UTF-8 by default it it all looks well. There is a Wiki page that collects problematic UTF-8 applications, at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fBadSoftware The list needs combing as several of the issues have been fixed. Any takers? There is also a page on problematic Unicode applications that support up to the BMP, at http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software_2fBMP_2dOnly UTF-8 is on the screens of Ubuntu for the next release, http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UTFEightByDefault Problems are listed at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UTFEightCurrentProblems Migration path at http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/UTFEightMigrationTool Personally, weighting in the advantages of UTF-8, I would not see any showstoppers here. In effect, as iso-8859-1 is the same to utf-8 (encoded as 1 byte), there core users of English are generally not affected. Some difficult tasks include: 1. LaTeX by design uses 8-bit characters and appears difficult to work-around. There is a utf8 package that supports a list of languages, however it's not full Unicode support. Status of Omega? Is LaTeX important anymore? 2. The Linux console as is can display Unicode (latin-based languages, greek, cyrillic only) and input is ok if no dead keys (accents) are involved. Thus, it's limited. The proper solution is to write a specific terminal emulation program that runs on the framebuffer (see https://bugzilla.redhat.com/beta/show_bug.cgi?id=143014) Will users want to use the console anyomore? Simos -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
