[gentoo-dev] Re: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8 by default

[Kerin Millar]

On 15/02/2012 12:22, Mr. Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2012 at 12:58:52PM +0100, Francesco R.(vivo) wrote:
>> as subject says could gentoo change the policy and set an UTF-8 environment by
>> default?

Perhaps it should define LANG="en_US.UTF-8" as a reasonable default, 
which would be in line with other notable distros. Arch also used to 
define LC_COLLATE="C" by default, probably to mitigate unpredictable 
behaviour in some applications, but have since dropped this additional 
variable so they must have deemed it no longer necessary.

I think that having a default configuration file would also raise 
awareness of the importance of locale configuration and make it less 
likely that users configure their systems inappropriately (defining 
LC_ALL, for instance).

>> P.S. would be nice to have a wd_WD.UTF-8 with WD standing for world, just a
>> country is so 1900

Different countries/regions have different standards and conventions for 
character classification, case conversion, date/numerical/currency 
formatting etc. There's no basis on which to formally standardise a 
world-wide definition.

>>
>
> However, the stage 3, last time I used it, didn't default to a UTF-8
> environment, and it didn't default to using and/or including a capable
> UTF-8 font. It is something I think we should look at changing.
>

Yet "unicode" is a default flag in the standard profiles. Most console 
fonts have poor coverage. The best one I've found thus far is 
"LatCyrGr-16" from fonty-rg, which provides good Latin and Cyrillic 
coverage along with some Greek and esoteric punctuation characters. 
Using this font, I've yet to find any developer's name that doesn't 
render as expected while perusing the contents of the portage tree.

Being a 512 character font, one loses bold support unless using a 
framebuffer console. Given that the default console fonts aren't 
especially useful, it seems a small price to pay.

--Kerin