On 29-02-2012 22:08:17 +0100, Francesco Riosa wrote:
> I'm not sure it's council material but it could be;
> Proposal to change the environment variables to achieve a utf-8 gentoo
> by default.
> It has been discussed in a thread "LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 by default" [1],
> some concerns have been expressed and some solution proposed, however
> there is no explicit consensus.
> If you're interested I can try to sum that thread up [2] and possibly
> do some research on the matter.

I think that discussion can be split into
1) if a UTF-8 profile should be set as default, and
2) what UTF-8 profile that would be

Just to give some hints/ideas here:
For 1), for many people it's a waste, and it's not POSIX (== C IIRC), so
should we really do that.  Also, how about this changing default for
existing systems.  Why not update the docs to strongly suggest to set an
UTF-8 profile instead.
Then, 2) is almost moot.  If you would default to an UTF-8 profile, I
think the only sensical option is en_US.UTF-8 (not en_GB).  However, if
you only strongly suggest in the installation docs, you can get away
from this problem, since the user has to choose his/her preference in
that case anyway.  Just a note that leaving en_US.UTF-8 always in is a
good idea would suffice, I guess.


-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level