Re: Default installation of UTF-8 locales

[Markus Kuhn <Markus dot Kuhn at cl dot cam dot ac dot uk>]

Ulrich Drepper wrote on 2000-11-08 07:04 UTC:
> I'm not adding all possible UTF-8 locales.  This is not useful in
> general.  People can do this themselves when needed.

Ulrich,

I do fully understand that UTF-8 locale files consume a bit more disk
space, but I think it is very important symbolically that at least the
following ones are installed by default and considered to be officially
supported in 2.2 (they are all missing from localedata/SUPPORTED at the
moment and therefore will not get installed by default):

el_GR.UTF-8      because polytonic Greek is not supported by any 8-bit set
                 Greek users are likely to be early UTF-8 adaptors

ru_RU.UTF-8      because Russia suffers from a great 8-bit charset confusion
                 Unicode is seen widely as the only long-term solution
                 (see http://czyborra.com/charsets/cyrillic.html )

de_DE.UTF-8      \
en_GB.UTF-8       | that's where *many* GNU/Linux developers live and we definitely
en_US.UTF-8       | want to encourage them a lot to play around with UTF-8 early
fr_FR.UTF-8      /

ja_JP.UTF-8      \
zh_CN.UTF-8       | for obvious reasons and to encourage early use of wcwidth()
zh_TW.UTF-8      /

The patch I sent out yesterday adds all of the above ones.

C.UTF-8 or POSIX.UTF-8    for those people who want to use UTF-8 but prefer
                          the semantics of the default locale for all other
                          aspects (sorting, etc.)

> > Also, the mk_MK locale is UTF-8 compatible, so it can be added to 
> > 'libc/localedata/SUPPORTED'

Since the Balkan countries are not covered well by either ISO 8859-2 or
ISO 8859-5 alone, they are probably also primary candidates for early
UTF-8 adoption.

Markus

-- 
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org,  WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>