On 07/21/17 10:27, Jonathan Corbet wrote: > On Thu, 20 Jul 2017 18:30:55 -0700 > frowand.list@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > >> Documentation/process/submitting-patches.rst contains a non-ascii >> character. Change it to the ascii equivalent. > > You should know better than to tell somebody like me that a hyphen and an > m-dash are equivalent! :) OK, so they aren't totally equivalent, but close enough. :) Should I have said analog instead of equivalent? And would you prefer '--' to '-'? > I don't have any real objection to this change, but I am curious: is the > m-dash creating a problem somewhere? We have plenty of non-ASCII > characters in Documentation/ and beyond, why change this one? Or to put > it another way, do you think we should have an ASCII-only policy for > documentation files? Ascii is a lowest common denominator. I can view and manipulate the file with any common text editor and common text utilities (eg, cat, grep, etc) on pretty much any Linux system that I walk up to. I don't need to go to any effort to try to figure out what a non-ascii character is (which is exactly what prompted my patch -- I wanted to know what the character my patch modifies is). Yes, I can change my terminal emulator character encoding to UTF-8, and change my LANG to en_US.UTF-8. And now vi and cat show the correct m-dash character. But then how do I grep for m-dash in files? Google tells me I might be able to <ctrl> + <shift> + u hex_value_of_mdash to enter an mdash, but I sure don't know what the hex value of mdash is. Plus I need to be observant enough to notice that the string I am grepping for contains an m-dash instead of a dash. And why should I assume "en_US" as the prefix to my UTF-8 LANG? To answer your second question, I would _prefer_ ASCII-only except for cases where being limited to ASCII is restricting the ability to convey information (properly). I would reverse your question, and ask what is the added value of non-ascii characters __in cases similar to this one__, that justifies the negative impact? (Please don't answer what the added value is in cases that are not similar to this one. I know the answer to that question is different.) > Thanks, > > jon > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
