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

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Fri May 21 21:32:01 UTC 2004


On Fri, 21 May 2004 17:00:36 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at merl.com> wrote:
> This is conceptually reasonable, but the
> change has been breaking old code and unexpectedly multi-lingual code for
> the last few years. The shift to Unicode has been extremely painful for a
> lot of programmers, including me, and remains painful as I have to clean 
> up tools or code from old source or other locations that make unwitting
> assumptions about this sort of behavior.

Yes I completely agree.... unwitting assumptions are the bane of pretty much
any process development not just the evolution of software. No-one is
suggesting that this isn't a painful change. But supporting native
human languages in the environment is important. If specific pieces of
code need to work in an ascii environment, that environment can be
created via environment variable manipulation as needed. To argue that
the default environment should be ascii though is an argument against
the importance of providing strong localization support.

Would a large virtual group hug help you handle the transition? 


-jef





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