Non UTF-8 charset fallback support in GLib (Was Re: plans for long term support releases?)

[Horst H. von Brand]

Daniel Yek <dyek at real.com> wrote:
> At 09:31 PM 1/17/2007, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> >On Wed, Jan 17, 2007 at 23:10:14 +0100,
> >   Ola Thoresen <redhat at olen.net> wrote:

[...]

> > > When we changed to UTF-8 as default, there were no
> > > easy way to convert filesystems, documents, text-files, webpages...
> 
> Not sure if these two utilities could help:
> (1) iconv -f old-encoding -t UTF-8 filename > newfilename
> 
> (2) utf8ize

recode (in Extras, I think).

Only problem is that if you recode a LaTeX file (which states the encoding
in its header) you'll get funny results...

[...]

> > > The first thing almost everyone I know that are installing Fedora,
> > > Redhat or Suse is doing is to change /etc/sysconfig/i18n to go back to
> > > en_US as default LANG. Simply because it takes a h... of a lot of work
> > > to convert all your files and applications and there are no good tools
> > > out there to help you.

Lived through the pain of updating here (Spanish /does/ use Latin-1, and I
have some texts in German too). It's not painless, but not that bad either.
And in my experience putting it off means much more pain than just biting
the bullet and converting, in the worst case on demand only.
-- 
Dr. Horst H. von Brand                   User #22616 counter.li.org
Departamento de Informatica                    Fono: +56 32 2654431
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