On Tue, Feb 19, 2008 at 08:44:07AM +0000, Darren Kenny wrote:
> Nicolas Williams wrote:
> >>         At the moment there are only two settings, you can disable the 
> >> whole
> >>         thing, and you can specify the charset encoding used for filenames.
> > 
> > Why should a charset be specified here?  Presumably the *language* to
> > localize these directory names to comes from the locale chosen by the
> > user, so why can't the charset come from the locale too?
> 
> In GNOME, the charset used for filenames is always utf-8 encoded (it can be
> overridden if needed through environment variables).

OK.

> In the case of XDG user dirs, it is not a GNOME applications, but desktop
> independent, hence it doesn't use glib, so we need a way to configure the
> charset to use - that is the purpose of setting the charset at the system 
> level.

I don't get this.  No matter what login program and desktop environment
is used there always is a user-selected locale.  Therefore, why not
honor the user's locale choice by taking the charset from the locale?

> Saying that, we actually wouldn't expect this to be changed much, and should
> always be utf-8.

Someone's bound to set this and a user is going to login using a locale
with a different charset, and things won't look right.

That the sysadmin can set the charset here is obnoxious, but if the only
way to use a charset other than UTF-8 when the user selects a non-UTF-8
locale, then that'd be a serious bug.

At the very least we need to support non-UTF-8 locale selections by the
user without having to update this file, and if that's done then why
bother with this system-wide setting?

Nico
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