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

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> You'd really want to a "which do you prefer, which can you use"
> survey, then; You don't really want to choose the result preferred by
> the most people, rather you want the result which is usable by the
> most people.

I tend to agree.  Donnie said something in his manifesto which I think
applies here: any of the proposed solutions is probably better than
doing nothing.

If I forget to tweak my locale and I end up with a comma as a decimal
mark it isn't the end of the world, and neither is some output in
metric units.  I've ended up working on many a global system where
times get reported in GMT and people put up with the inconvenience
because they realize that any standard is better than no standard.

What is the real end-user impact of any of this stuff anyway?  During
the install the thing that matters is being able to partition disks
and compile kernels and such.  I doubt that too many users will be
dependent on installer locale settings for displaying weather reports
or such.  If they don't set locale, then it is like not setting
localtime - you just get to live with some default.  I would imagine
that at least by having a UTF-8 locale users would be able to do
things like set full names of users using unicode, etc.

Rich