On Fri, Jul 22, 2005 at 06:44:11PM +0100, Roger Leigh wrote: > While this is undoubtedly simpler, it will also cause the same amount > of annoyance to non-UTF-8 users at the current situation annoys us. > This might hinder its integration. > > Wouldn't it be better to do both: make UTF-8 the default *and* provide > a sysctl to change it if required?
I don't think a sysctl is okay here; that one is only able to set a single system-wide boolean, while the charset being used can vary from user to user, and even from terminal to terminal for one user (nowadays I very often mix latin2 and utf8 until I finally fully switch to utf8). So if there's anything to do with legacy support, that should be yet another per-terminal ioctl or whatever flag (just as current IUTF8) which tells the default when the terminal is reset. And then let _its_ default be configurable at kernel compile time or by a sysctl... I don't think it's all worth it. I have a feeling that people often want to spend way too much effort to support both legacy and UTF-8, I believe it'd be much simpler and faster to fully switch to UTF-8 as quickly as possible... -- Egmont -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
