----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta(a)gmail.com>
To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases"
<fedora-test-list(a)redhat.com>
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 5:32 PM
Subject: Re: Why is "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" the default in Fedora
On Fri, 21 May 2004 17:00:36 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia
<nkadel(a)merl.com>
wrote:
> This is conceptually reasonable, but the
> change has been breaking old code and unexpectedly multi-lingual code
for
> the last few years. The shift to Unicode has been extremely
painful for
a
> lot of programmers, including me, and remains painful as I have
to clean
> up tools or code from old source or other locations that make unwitting
> assumptions about this sort of behavior.
Yes I completely agree.... unwitting assumptions are the bane of pretty
much
any process development not just the evolution of software. No-one
is
suggesting that this isn't a painful change. But supporting native
human languages in the environment is important. If specific pieces of
code need to work in an ascii environment, that environment can be
created via environment variable manipulation as needed. To argue that
the default environment should be ascii though is an argument against
the importance of providing strong localization support.
Would a large virtual group hug help you handle the transition?
-jef
A cookie would be better. Wait, my web browser blocks cookies! Weep, wail,
whimper! No cookie?
Look, I know that many folks in the world want to go the Unicode way in
order to support new capabilities, enough that it's pretty much set in
stone. But a great deal of software *breaks* when you attempt to compile it
with locale support, especially since commercial UNIX versions of the
gettext toolset vary fairly wildly in subtleties of their implementation.
It's a related set of continuing problems, and they bite lots of developers
at odd times.