plans for long term support releases?

[Ola Thoresen]

Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 23:10:14 +0100,
>   Ola Thoresen <redhat at olen.net> 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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