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

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jeff Spaleta" <jspaleta at gmail.com>
To: "For testers of Fedora Core development releases"
<fedora-test-list at redhat.com>
Sent: Friday, May 21, 2004 5:32 PM
Subject: Re: Why is "LANG=en_US.UTF-8" the default in Fedora


> 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

A cookie would be better. Wait, my web browser blocks cookies! Weep, wail,
whimper! No cookie?

Look, I know that many folks in the world want to go the Unicode way in
order to support new capabilities, enough that it's pretty much set in
stone. But a great deal of software *breaks* when you attempt to compile it
with locale support, especially since commercial UNIX versions of the
gettext toolset vary fairly wildly in subtleties of their implementation.
It's a related set of continuing problems, and they bite lots of developers
at odd times.