** Reply to message from Harry Putnam <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on Sun, 10 Nov 2002 14:43:46 -0800
> "Mike A. Harris" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > >>Unless I did something dumb during install this is what I got with a > >>fairly stock install. > > > > Documented in RELEASE-NOTES for 8.0 > > Yes, I see it now thanks. I expected to also find some more hits on > LANG explaining the change to UTF-8. All I see is a list of problems > it causes but no discussion of why it is the default. > > Is that discussed somewhere else? I am pasting here Havoc's original explanation of the move to UTF-8 as posted to this list a month ago: --------------- Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2002 14:46:25 -0400 From: Havoc Pennington <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Rationale behind UTF-8? Robert Claeson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I noticed that Unicode UTF-8 is now the default encoding when most > Western Europeans locales are selected. Since some ISO 8859 character > set is usually the norm for those locales, I would be interested in the > rationale behind Psyche using UTF-8 rather than ISO 8859. > The reasons for Unicode include: - so you can use multiple languages at once in a document - so that programs can write a single generic algorithm for say word breaking, instead of special-casing each locale - because most of the modern apps (all Qt, GTK apps, most scripting languages, etc.) are using Unicode internally, so using it externally speeds things up - so that Chinese/Japanese/Korean are going through the same codepaths as European languages, so that there are fewer CJK-specific issues. (Of course we don't default to UTF-8 for CJK yet, but it's coming.) - because the filesystem needs to be in UTF-8 unless all users of a system are using the same language exclusively FWIW, the issues people are seeing with UTF-8 are almost all things that Asian users have been living with for years... now everyone's in the same boat, let's patch the leaks. ;-) Havoc ---------- Hope this helps. Sounds to me as if the implementation was meant to make coding easier for multi-language systems rather than to make things easier for individual single-language users. I suppose that will come when the whole world is using Unicode. jb > > > -- > Psyche-list mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
