Re: [PATCH] replace 0xA0 to whitespace in plain text files (part 2)

[Alan Barrett <apb%cequrux.com@localhost>]

On Fri, 12 Sep 2008, Joachim Knig wrote:
> But at least, we could make the UTF-8 encoding explicit by including
> the BOM (byte order mark) at the beginning of such a file.It is the
> byte sequence 0xEF 0xBB 0xBF.

There are (IMHO good) arguments against including BOM in UTF-8.  For
example, see <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#ucsutf>.

> UTF-8 should IMO not be the default encoding (in the absence
> of an explicit marker), we better stay at latin1.

I question the premise behind "stay at latin1".  You can't "stay" with
something you don't already have, and as far as I know, NetBSD does not
have a policy to use latin1 as a default encoding for source code and
text files distributed with the operating system.  If we do have such an
existing policy, then where is the policy documented?

--apb (Alan Barrett)