Package: xterm
Version: 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8
Severity: important
After discussing this with Branden on IRC, I was asked to file a bug
report, so here goes:
uxterm is now the default alternative for x-terminal-emulator; however,
debian-installer does not set an UTF-8 locale for my language (nb_NO).
Thus, I'd expect uxterm to behave like Branden thought it did; quote
Branden on IRC: "uxterm doesn't start a UTF-8 xterm if no UTF-8 locale
is set".
However, uxterm does. If no UTF-8 locale is set (in LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE or
LANG), uxterm forcibly adds .UTF-8 to one of those ands starts an xterm
with -u8. From my point of view, this is broken; I am using a non-UTF-8
locale (and don't even have any UTF-8 locales generated), yet
x-terminal-emulator (which is the default in almost all window managers
in Debian) starts up using UTF-8. This means that my xterms suddenly use
a different character set from my aterms or eterms or whatnot, and even
more important, they use a different character set from my ssh sessions
and Linux consoles.
I understand that people want to push UTF-8, but a forced default of
using UTF-8 does _not_ belong in xterm. If we want UTF-8 to be the
default in Debian across the board, that should be set in the installer,
so it's globally in place instead of doing ugly shell script wrappers. :-)
My proposed solution is to do one or more of the following (in no
particular order):
1. Make xterm the default x-terminal-emulator again.
2. Make uxterm not mess with the locale if it isn't UTF-8.
3. Make debian-installer set UTF-8 locales by default for _all_
languages.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 3.1
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.8.1
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_US.ISO8859-1 (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Versions of packages xterm depends on:
ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-18 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an
ii libexpat1 1.95.8-1 XML parsing C library - runtime li
ii libfontconfig1 2.2.3-3 generic font configuration library
ii libfreetype6 2.1.7-2.2 FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii libice6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 Inter-Client Exchange library
ii libncurses5 5.4-4 Shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libsm6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X Window System Session Management
ii libxaw7 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X Athena widget set library
ii libxext6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X Window System miscellaneous exte
ii libxft2 2.1.2-6 FreeType-based font drawing librar
ii libxmu6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X Window System miscellaneous util
ii libxpm4 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X pixmap library
ii libxrender1 0.8.3-7 X Rendering Extension client libra
ii libxt6 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X Toolkit Intrinsics
ii xlibs 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X Window System client libraries m
ii xlibs-data 4.3.0.dfsg.1-8 X Window System client data
-- no debconf information
