Re: [2.6 patch] UTF-8 fixes in comments

From: Alan Cox
Date: Tue Apr 29 2008 - 06:22:21 EST


> Well, booting 2.6.25 with "init=/bin/bash" results in backspace
> eating the prompt after pressing accentuated letters. Even the

Did you put the bash shell and the console into unicode mode ?

> Funny that you mention Windows. Windows has been using 16-bit unicode
> for a long time without problems. It's a clean encoding. Like it or not.

I would describe the UCS-2 situation as a disaster area - embedded nuls
causing breakage, inability to represent the full unicode space and
awkward programming interfaces.

> You know why we got this encoding ? Simply because it was designed by
> english speakers who did not want to be impacted at all by the transition.

Actually it was primarily designed to make moving encoding painless so
that ascii still worked and C properties like \0 plus traditional
Unixisms like "/" just worked.

> BTW, do you have an UTF-8 patch for the vt320 and vt510 I use as an
> always-on console on my servers ? Clearly, the system does not have to

screen supports the needed transliteration for you.

Alan
--
"Having worked in a university for more than twenty years after leaving
industry, I had become unused to seeing management skill routinely
exercised, universities being administered rather than managed"
-- Peter Checkland

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