Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:43:41 +0300 | From | Adrian Bunk <> | Subject | Re: [2.6 patch] UTF-8 fixes in comments |
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On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:14:23AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote: > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:29:11AM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote: > > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 07:06:05AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote: > > > On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 06:29:43PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > > > Willy Tarreau wrote: > > > > >Is this really needed Adrian ? I mean, everyone reads iso-8859-1, not > > > > >everyone reads UTF-8. > > > > > > > > "Everyone" who speaks a Western European language, perhaps; and even > > > > then, mostly because a lot of tools still have a "oh, it's not valid > > > > UTF-8, guess iso-8859-1" mode. > > > > > > Or simply because people have not migrated all their install, or have > > > explicitly disabled UTF-8 a few hours after starting to use it once > > > they discovered the mess it caused and the poor support from the > > > tools :-/ > > > > Non-ancient distributions default to UTF-8 and have tools that handle it > > fine. > > > > If you had bad experiences in the last millenium you should try again. > > Well, I accidentally used a freshly installed laptop running mandriva 2008. > I was typing in a terminal inside KDE (I don't know the program name, sort > of an xterm, but with huge borders all around). I made a typo in a word and > typed in a "é" (e acute). Pressing backspace to fix it showed me that I > remove more chars than typed. I tried again. Pressing this letter 5 times, > then 10 times backspace. I removed 5 chars from the prompt. I suspect that > if I had used some chars with wider encoding (eg 4 bytes), I could have > removed as many... Clearly those tools are not ready. >...
This sounds as if you had UTF-8 characters in a non UTF-8 environment.
If you did your "explicitly disabled UTF-8" then this is what triggered it.
> > > > The most common instance of non-ASCII > > > > characters in Linux kernel code are people's names, and there are plenty > > > > of names which aren't representable in either ASCII or iso-8859-1. > > > > > > > > The debate on this was years ago, and the consensus was to migrate to > > > > UTF-8; however, the salient information should be expressed in the ASCII > > > > character set unless impossible. > > > > > > And do we really consider that people's names in *comments* cannot > > > be converted to pure ASCII ? I'm western european and have always > > > been against accents in comments (another reason to write comments > > > in english BTW). > > > > Accents are very rare in names in the kernel. > > > > Most non-ASCII characters are umlauts and there's no sane way to > > express them in ASCII (and the vowels without umlaut are pronounced > > quite differently and might even make names look very strange). > > Agreed, but it's been done for *years*. I received mails from people > spelled "jorn" or "jurgen" and they had no trouble using that spelling > in their names or mail addresses.
Email addresses are a different topic.
But it's not right in names, and if someone then pronounces their name according to the wrong writing the result is also wrong.
> > And that's only within European languages, outside it becomes even > > worse. > > > > > Unix and internet have lived without accents for > > > almost 30 years without anyone really bothering. And now we try to > > > put them everywhere (even in domain names, implying big security > > > issues) and it causes real annoyances. People's names have not > > > changed in 30 years, so I guess that the rules used during this > > > time to ASCII-fy the names are still usable. > > > > The comments in the kernel have been converted to UTF-8 quite some time > > ago, what I'm fixing with my patch is just some recent non-UTF-8 stuff > > that creeped in. > > Well, if that had already begun, at least you're standardizing. >... > Willy
cu Adrian
--
"Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days. "Only a promise," Lao Er said. Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed
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