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

[Walter Dnes]

On Wed, Aug 01, 2012 at 04:29:42PM -0400, Michael Orlitzky wrote

> Every locale is wrong for somebody; the idea was that by taking
> a survey, you could make it wrong for the least amount of people
> (by default).

  Question... has anybody ever considered that maybe a POSIX locale
is wrong for the least amount of people???  There's also a very damning
statement in the post that started this thread...

On Thu, Jul 19, 2012 at 11:39:59PM +0200, Sascha Cunz wrote
> I recently discovered that I for some reason haven't noticed the
> warning about setting the locale to utf-8 in the gentoo handbook for
> obviously several years; thus i was still running all my systems in
> a POSIX locale since i never cared much about it.
>
> However, since I noticed, I talked to several people about it; all
> of them stating as first response: "Not shipping with a utf-8 locale
> turned on by default nowadays probably is a bug in your distro"

  That's right... the poster was running a POSIX locale for several
years ***AND DID NOT HAVE ANY PROBLEMS RELATED TO IT***.  Then "several
people said" "Not shipping with a utf-8 locale turned on by default
nowadays probably is a bug in your distro".  And suddenly it's a
problem.  What's next?  Despite running with no problems for many years
with a separate /usr and no initramfs, will we have "several people"
come along and tell us that it's a bug in our distro?  Oh... wait...

  The fact that "other distros do it" does not constitute justification
for us to do it.  If I wanted to run Redhat or Ubuntu, I'd run Redhat or
Ubuntu.  We're ignoring a very basic question here... what problems does
shipping with a POSIX locale cause that would be fixed by setting a UTF8
default locale???  I want a real answer.  Not something along the lines
of "But daddy, all the other kids are doing it".

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>