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    SubjectRe: [2.6 patch] UTF-8 fixes in comments
    On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:14:23AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
    > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 10:29:11AM +0300, Adrian Bunk wrote:
    > > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 07:06:05AM +0200, Willy Tarreau wrote:
    > > > On Mon, Apr 28, 2008 at 06:29:43PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
    > > > > Willy Tarreau wrote:
    > > > > >Is this really needed Adrian ? I mean, everyone reads iso-8859-1, not
    > > > > >everyone reads UTF-8.
    > > > >
    > > > > "Everyone" who speaks a Western European language, perhaps; and even
    > > > > then, mostly because a lot of tools still have a "oh, it's not valid
    > > > > UTF-8, guess iso-8859-1" mode.
    > > >
    > > > Or simply because people have not migrated all their install, or have
    > > > explicitly disabled UTF-8 a few hours after starting to use it once
    > > > they discovered the mess it caused and the poor support from the
    > > > tools :-/
    > >
    > > Non-ancient distributions default to UTF-8 and have tools that handle it
    > > fine.
    > >
    > > If you had bad experiences in the last millenium you should try again.
    >
    > Well, I accidentally used a freshly installed laptop running mandriva 2008.
    > I was typing in a terminal inside KDE (I don't know the program name, sort
    > of an xterm, but with huge borders all around). I made a typo in a word and
    > typed in a "é" (e acute). Pressing backspace to fix it showed me that I
    > remove more chars than typed. I tried again. Pressing this letter 5 times,
    > then 10 times backspace. I removed 5 chars from the prompt. I suspect that
    > if I had used some chars with wider encoding (eg 4 bytes), I could have
    > removed as many... Clearly those tools are not ready.
    >...

    This sounds as if you had UTF-8 characters in a non UTF-8 environment.

    If you did your "explicitly disabled UTF-8" then this is what triggered it.

    > > > > The most common instance of non-ASCII
    > > > > characters in Linux kernel code are people's names, and there are plenty
    > > > > of names which aren't representable in either ASCII or iso-8859-1.
    > > > >
    > > > > The debate on this was years ago, and the consensus was to migrate to
    > > > > UTF-8; however, the salient information should be expressed in the ASCII
    > > > > character set unless impossible.
    > > >
    > > > And do we really consider that people's names in *comments* cannot
    > > > be converted to pure ASCII ? I'm western european and have always
    > > > been against accents in comments (another reason to write comments
    > > > in english BTW).
    > >
    > > Accents are very rare in names in the kernel.
    > >
    > > Most non-ASCII characters are umlauts and there's no sane way to
    > > express them in ASCII (and the vowels without umlaut are pronounced
    > > quite differently and might even make names look very strange).
    >
    > Agreed, but it's been done for *years*. I received mails from people
    > spelled "jorn" or "jurgen" and they had no trouble using that spelling
    > in their names or mail addresses.

    Email addresses are a different topic.

    But it's not right in names, and if someone then pronounces their name
    according to the wrong writing the result is also wrong.

    > > And that's only within European languages, outside it becomes even
    > > worse.
    > >
    > > > Unix and internet have lived without accents for
    > > > almost 30 years without anyone really bothering. And now we try to
    > > > put them everywhere (even in domain names, implying big security
    > > > issues) and it causes real annoyances. People's names have not
    > > > changed in 30 years, so I guess that the rules used during this
    > > > time to ASCII-fy the names are still usable.
    > >
    > > The comments in the kernel have been converted to UTF-8 quite some time
    > > ago, what I'm fixing with my patch is just some recent non-UTF-8 stuff
    > > that creeped in.
    >
    > Well, if that had already begun, at least you're standardizing.
    >...
    > Willy

    cu
    Adrian

    --

    "Is there not promise of rain?" Ling Tan asked suddenly out
    of the darkness. There had been need of rain for many days.
    "Only a promise," Lao Er said.
    Pearl S. Buck - Dragon Seed

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