Dnia 29-03-2007, czw o godzinie 16:24 -0400, Rich Felker napisał(a): > UTF-8 has been around for almost 15 years now, longer than any real > character-aware 8bit locale support on Linux. It was a mistake that > 8bit locales were ever implemented on Linux. If things had been done > right from the beginning we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
In 1996 a famous message by Tomasz Kłoczko has been posted to some Polish newsgroups <http://www.man.lodz.pl/LISTY/POLIP/1996/07/0396.html> (in Polish). It advocated using ISO-8859-2 instead of stripping accents (which was common on Unix) and instead of CP-1250 (which was common on Windows) when writing in Polish in the Internet. It claimed that Linux is getting ready for supporting other encodings than ASCII and ISO-8859-1, that the amount of Linux software which needs fixing is small enough that it can be done in a reasonable time, and it has shown what to expect from web pages, e-mailers and newsreaders. Around that time the resources and the knowledge needed to configure a Linux system to support Polish at all were getting strong enough that the recommendation “please don’t use Polish letters in the Internet, as many systems can’t display them properly” was getting obsolete and its supporters were becoming a minority. In these years it was hard enough for Linux to support more than Latin1, and some software had to be specially configured to support more than ASCII. We’ve had a Latin2 console font and some bitmap X fonts. Netscape was still emitting only Latin1 Postscript, so Juliusz Chroboczek has written the “ogonkify” program which munged the Postscript by substituting composed Latin2 characters instead. UTF-8 was out of the question these days. It was completely unsupported by common software on both Linux and Windows. UTF-8 support on Linux lags about 10 years behind removing the assumption about Latin1. It’s harder than it might seem. I switched my Linux system from ISO-8859-2 to UTF-8 in 2007. The PLD Linux Distribution has translated the *.spec files from a mixture of encodings (different for each language) to UTF-8 in 2007. Only recent years have brought UTF-8 support to LaTeX and ncurses. There is still some software I have installed here which doesn’t work with UTF-8. I switched from ekg to gaim and from a2ps to paps because of this. UTF-8 support in some quite popular programs still relies on unofficial patches: mc, pine, fmt. There is still work to do. -- __("< Marcin Kowalczyk \__/ [EMAIL PROTECTED] ^^ http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/ -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
