Re: [gentoo-dev] UTF-8 locale by default

[Ben de Groot]

On 20 July 2012 06:28, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
>>>>>> On Thu, 19 Jul 2012, Sascha Cunz wrote:
>
>> Is there a reason for not using at least en_US.UTF-8 as a "sane"
>> default value?
>
> Because there's no one-size-fits-all locale, but it is specific to
> every system so the user must configure it?

While this is understandable, the fact remains that not having a
UTF-8 locale by default in our stage3 environment is sub-optimal.

I understand why the council rejected Debian's C.UTF-8 option,
but is there really no better default that we can use?

Without any default locale set, in practically all cases that means
that the user is presented with English, and mostly the American
variant. So, in practice, we are defaulting to en_US, just not in a
unicode environment. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Also, in most other places (such as our website, GLEPs, ebuilds)
we default to en_US.UTF-8.

So let's upgrade to en_US.UTF-8, which is for most users more
desirable than the current situation. Of course we will still advise
them to set their desired locales in /etc/locale.gen. But at least
they will start with a unicode environment, as expected anno 2012.


> The matter was recently discussed in this mailing list [1] and also in
> the March 2012 council meeting [2], and as a result the docs team has
> amended the respective section [3] of the handbook.
>
> Ulrich
>
> [1] <http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_2ffb7ea72e6209439600c371f6fc071d.xml>
> [2] <http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/council/meeting-logs/20120313.txt>
> [3] <http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=1&chap=8>
>

-- 
Cheers,

Ben | yngwin
Gentoo developer
Gentoo Qt project lead, Gentoo Wiki admin