Ian Pilcher wrote:
Björn Persson wrote:
I use Latin 1 (ISO 8859-1). Well, so far I'm running Fedora Core 1, but when I upgrade I'll still use Latin 1. I've got lots of text files and filenames with non-English letters in them. No matter which operating system system I use I'll be stuck to Latin 1 for the foreseeable future. For filenames, a tool could be written to transcode them automatically, but for the files' content there's *no* way for the system to know which files would have to be transcoded and which would get destroyed if it tried to transcode them.
Based on your response to Jeff, however, you seem to be OK with using UTF-8 for /etc/passwd, even though non-ASCII characters would have to be converted to ISO-8859-1.
Yes. Where's the contradiction in that? Programs and library routines that handle the passwd file would know that it's in UTF-8, and convert to and from other encodings when necessary. The worst thing that could happen is that administrators upgrading their systems could have to run a tool to transcode their passwd files. Once.
Couldn't I run the same tool on all my other files? Yes, *if* I were willing to go through them one by one to decide which of them had to be converted.
Björn Persson
