On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 01:00:29AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > On 2008-03-22 16:28:43 +0100, Thomas Roessler wrote: > > The user isn't assumed to run under UTF-8. The user is assumed to > > run in a consistent environment in which the terminal, the file > > system, and local files share a single character set which is > > inferred from the user's locale settings. > > This is absolute non-sense! That statement is stupid, annoying, and inflammatory. What Thomas described is how Unix is designed to work. It's not nonsense. If your locale settings are not consistent, you should expect to have problems. > In particular nowadays, where files (e.g. mail messages) often come > from remote people, who may use various encodings. That's what iconv is for. If you're not using a unicode environment, you're making a concious choice that only data encoded in the locale you've selected matters to you. The iconv library will happily convert the characters it can, and replace ones it can't with a character indicating such. If your character set doesn't contain all of the world's possible characters, that's the best you can hope for (which is why Unicode was created). If you're a native French speaker, concerned that someone will send you a mail in EUC-JP and you won't be able to read the characters in it, switch your settings to a unicode environment. You don't have to, but it's the ONLY WAY what you want will work. If you only care to be able to read ISO-8559-1 encoded data, then using that environment, and configuring your locale consistently for it, works perfectly fine. If you've chosen to use ISO-8859-1, and you care about other encodings, then you're clearly either uninformed about how locales work in Unix, have constraints placed upon you by outside factors (i.e. work reqirements), or you're just an idiot. There are solutions to the first two problems... -- Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02 -=-=-=-=- This message is posted from an invalid address. Replying to it will result in undeliverable mail due to spam prevention. Sorry for the inconvenience.
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