Anyone using non-UTF-8 locale(s)?

[Björn Persson]

Ian Pilcher wrote:

> Björn Persson wrote:
> 
>> I use Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1). Well, so far I'm running Fedora Core 1, but
>> when I upgrade I'll still use Latin 1. I've got lots of text files and
>> filenames with non-English letters in them. No matter which operating
>> system system I use I'll be stuck to Latin 1 for the foreseeable future.
>> For filenames, a tool could be written to transcode them automatically,
>> but for the files' content there's *no* way for the system to know which
>> files would have to be transcoded and which would get destroyed if it
>> tried to transcode them.
> 
> Based on your response to Jeff, however, you seem to be OK with using
> UTF-8 for /etc/passwd, even though non-ASCII characters would have to
> be converted to ISO-8859-1.

Yes. Where's the contradiction in that? Programs and library routines 
that handle the passwd file would know that it's in UTF-8, and convert 
to and from other encodings when necessary. The worst thing that could 
happen is that administrators upgrading their systems could have to run 
a tool to transcode their passwd files. Once.

Couldn't I run the same tool on all my other files? Yes, *if* I were 
willing to go through them one by one to decide which of them had to be 
converted.

Björn Persson