On Tue, 17 May 2005 19:58:48 -0700 Andrew Morton <[email protected]> wrote: > Paul LeoNerd Evans <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > This patch fixes a bug in the virtual terminal driver, whereby the > > UTF-8 mode is reset to "off" following a console reset, such as might > > be delivered by mingetty, screen, vim, etc... > > Is it a bug? What did earlier kernels do? 2.4.x? I haven't checked earlier 2.4 kernels, but I know the 2.6 ones have done this for quite some time; a good year or so at least. > Presumably userspace knows what mode the user wants the terminal to be > using. Shouldn't userspace be resetting that mode after a reset? Well, that does require changes to a lot of the programs that talk to the console, moreover, they now need to be sensitive to whether it is in UTF-8 mode, where previously they did not. E.g. consider mingetty... Also, as I understand it, there is one keyboard map, and one console font for the entire virtual console system - either they are UTF-8, or not. It doesn't really make sense to be switching these about. Moreover, this code also affects dynamic creation of new virtual consoles. E.g. when debian's "oh no, I can't start the X server" ncurses dialog appears, without my patch it prints UTF-8 characters on a new console, tty8, on a console that isn't set to display them, and mass breakage results. Now, it all happens cleanly, because the new console is already in UTF-8 mode. Were this to be pushed to userland, every program that outputs data would need to detect the UTF-8 mode of the console, and set it appropriately. Moreover, they would need to perform this logic only on a Linux virtual console; such things as XTerm or Gnome-terminal do it automatically. -- Paul "LeoNerd" Evans [email protected] ICQ# 4135350 | Registered Linux# 179460 http://www.leonerd.org.uk/
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