On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 7:27 AM Wouter Verhelst <wou...@debian.org> wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:47:42AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote: > > Preferring to use Unicode does seem to be the direction that all of > > computing is going in, as a simplifying assumption - for example W3C > > advice for HTML is "You should always use the UTF-8 character encoding"[1] > > - and as we know, things that aren't tested usually don't work. So I > > think the level of functionality for non-UTF-8 locales and encodings in > > the software we package is going to decline over time, whether Debian > > wants it to or not. > > If the world's most populous country uses something that is not UTF-8, I > think it's safe to say it's being tested, if only by people who will > file bugs when things go awry. > > If the PRC government *requires* a non-UTF-8 encoding for things sold to > them, we would be doing our users who want to sell a product containing > Debian to the PRC government a disservice by dropping support for it > altogether. > > We don't have to ensure it works perfectly out of the box; just that > support is achievable with a reasonable amount of work.
Thank you Wouter! That is exactly my thought, although after my initial message, I have been told that "zh_CN.GB18030 as system locale" may not be a strict requirement, and thus an explicit UI for selecting zh_CN.GB18030 as system locale may not be necessary. A fellow Chinese DD suggested that some documentation on how to edit /etc/locale.gen to enable zh_CN.GB18030 or other non-UTF-8 encodings would likely be sufficient. That said, if the testing authorities do want zh_CN.GB18030 to be easily selectable), I think we can always sneak "zh_CN.GB18030" into the locales configuration interface in a point release. <grin, duck, run> Cheers, Anthony
