Why is "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" the default in Fedora

John Morris jmorris at beau.org
Thu May 20 04:01:52 UTC 2004


On Wed, 19 May 2004, Ernest L. Williams Jr. wrote:

> Many applications seem to have a problem with the default locale in
> Fedora. (e.g. adobe acrobat reader)
> 
> Why is the default US.UTF-8?

Because RH is hellbent on making Unicode the standard encoding.  Like 
their previous attempts at getting out in front of an emerging standard it 
tends to break a lot of things.  But because it is breaking in such a high 
profile distro it gets fixed.  See GCC, GLIBC, ELF, pthreads, SELinux, 
etc.

In the end it is going to be a good thing if you live outside the US or
are RedHat and want to sell products and services outside the US.  But for
now expect to do a lot of "LANG=C <programname>" to workaround the
problems or edit /etc/sysconfig/i18n.

-- 
John M.      http://www.beau.org/~jmorris        This post is 100% M$ Free!
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