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On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 05:11:36PM +0200, Andreas K. Huettel wrote |
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> Hi Walter, |
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> |
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> > "-pch -roaming -sendmail -spell -tcpd -udev -udisks -unicode -upower |
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> > -xinerama" |
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> |
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> mostly out of curiosity, why do you want to disable unicode support |
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> here? |
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> |
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> This feels odd to me since utf8 has effectively become the standard |
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> encoding over the past years. |
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|
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I don't know if this has improved over the years, but my initial |
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experience with unicode was rather negative. The fact that text |
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files were twice as large wasn't a major problem in itself. The |
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real showstopper was that importing text files into spreadsheets |
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and text-editors and word processors failed miseraby. |
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|
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I looked at a unicode text file with a binary viewer. It turns out |
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that a simple text string like "1234" was actually... |
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|
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"1" binary-zero "2" binary-zero "3" binary-zero "4" binary zero, etc. |
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|
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This padding explains why the file was twice as large, and also why |
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"a simple textfile import" failed miserably. |
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|
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On top of that Cyrillic letters like "m", "i", "c", and "o" are |
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considered different from their English equivalants. Security experts |
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showed proof-of-cocept attacks where clicking on "microsoft.com" can |
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take you to a hostile domain (queue the jokes). I don't speak or read |
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or write any languages which have thousands of unique characters. |
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Seeing Chinese spam "as it was intended to be seen", is not a priority |
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for me. |
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|
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-- |
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Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org> |
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I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications |
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