Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 23:10:14 +0100,
Ola Thoresen <redhat@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
One of the worst examples of this is the change to UTF-8 as default
charset. I am a devoted UTF-8 user myself, but it is probably the
single change that has caused most pain for others, and it is stil
causing trouble. When we changed to UTF-8 as default, there were no
easy way to convert filesystems, documents, text-files, webpages...
The first thing almost everyone I know that are installing Fedora,
Redhat or Suse is doing is to change /etc/sysconfig/i18n to go back to
en_US as default LANG. Simply because it takes a h... of a lot of work
to convert all your files and applications and there are no good tools
out there to help you.
UTF-8 is an encoding and en_US is a locale. You are comparing different
types of things. Perhaps you meant that UTF-8 was being used instead of
ASCII or Latin 1? Note that ASCII is in a sense a subset of UTF-8, so
converting from ASCII to UTF-8 isn't a big deal.
The point is that everyone who has used linux since before the switch to
utf8 has lots of files in latin-1 (for instance) encoding. Filesystems
with filenames with latin-1 characters (not only ascii), we have old
servers with OSes that does not use utf8 that we need to connect to and
so on.
The change of locale from en_US.UTF-8 to en_US makes all the problems go
away, because all your applications are still expecting these filenames
to be latin-1, that the content is latin-1, they do not give you any
surprises when you have weird characters in your password, and so on.
I guess the problem is much bigger in Europe than in many other places,
as we have a love for all kinds of different characters - and many
people also use them in their filenames and passwords.
Note. I personally have converted most of my files and filesystems, and
I think utf8 is great (using the tools others have emailed about here).
But I also know it is the biggest complaint most people around me has
about modern distributions. Because it is a very log way from "no
problem" to switch charset for most users.
I only wanted to point out that this is te situation right now. People
are not "upgrading" their filesystems, and they are utilizing all kinds
of tricks to make the old stuff work. We do not want that to happen
with an upgrade of an other important package in the future, so we
should try to make the tools to convert config and content available
before an upgrade that we know might be troublesome.
And I also just want to say that the release-notes have been much, much
better for the last releases. So thanks a lot to the people writing and
compiling them.
Rgds.
Ola Thoresen
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