Strange characters with pstree and ncurses apps -- i18n problem

[Jason Aeschilman]

Why does Red Hat 8 and later (including Fedora) default to UTF-8 character
encoding when most command line apps don't yet support it?

It took me forever to figure out why pstree and various ncurses apps would
show strange characters in place of expected characters.  Mostly I'd get a
bunch of 'a circumflex' characters (â) -- the 'a with hat'.

I spent hours fiddling with different terminal settings (on both the client
and server side), getting inconsistent results.  Then, after many hours
searching in the newsgroups, I came across an article about the i18n file
[/etc/sysconfig/i18n].  Here is what it looks like on a default English
language installation:

LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
SUPPORTED="en_US.UTF-8:en_US:en"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

A simple edit later and all the problems go away:

LANG="en_US"
SUPPORTED="en_US:en"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"

Is there any need at all for UTF-8 encoding for English language
installations?  And why have it enabled by default if it creates problems
with command line apps?  I'm sure many have seen this problem and haven't
figured it out, so hopefully this knowledge helps you.  If it does, let me
know, I'm curious how many others have shared my pain.  Particularly, I'd
like to know how the Fedora maintainers feel about this.

--
J.A.K.E.
[ jake1138 AT yahoo DOT com ]