Unicode (was Re: Updating ncurses in base)

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting "J.R. Oldroyd" <fbsd at opal.com> (from Mon, 26 Jun 2006 12:02:45 -0400):

> Is it time to consider making the utf-8 encoding the default character
> encoding in FreeBSD?
>
> Most other OSs have moved to utf-8 over the last few years.  We
> remain somewhat behind in this respect, which is odd, considering
> the wide international participation in the FreeBSD community.
>
> It's not much work to do this.  The notes in the link I posted
> and the earlier message which started this thread suggest where
> work still needs to be done:
>
> 	- ncurses in the base system will need updating to a
> 	  current version with wide-character support
>
> 	- we may need to update the base fonts so that more
> 	  iso10646 ones have more complete character support

If there's not a BSD licensed replacement with at least the same  
quality, this may be the hardest part.

> 	- some work will need to be done to fix wide-character
> 	  related bugs in a few utilities, e.g., nvi
>
> 	- utf-8 will have to be made the default character
> 	  encoding in startup scripts for the various utilities
> 	  and ports that are affected

Why? The start scripts are written in english and I doubt we will  
start to use translated ones. So all they use is/should be 7-bit  
clean. Wy do we need to make UTF-8 the default for them? If someone  
wants to use UTF-8, he can set the locale accordingly, but for the  
rest of the system I don't see a point in switching.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
Sometimes I live in the country,
And sometimes I live in town.
And sometimes I have a great notion,
To jump in the river and drown.

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137