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Re: wide characters and i18n



Erik Fair <fair%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:

> 2. Unicode/UTF-8 as a new default offers backward compatibility while
> expanding the character space quite broadly, and without anywhere near
> as much work (or as much paradigm shift, i.e. breaking "Unix files are
> a bag of bytes") on our software,

Sorry, this is wrong. This assumes that you don't use anything ASCII
compatible (more or less). I do, and "UTF-8 by default" will cause major
pain to me and to many users here.

The main reason for it is that UTF-8 wastes half of bandwidth on wire,
and some of NetBSD tools don't tolerate long file names. E.g. pax.
I meet border cases already, and UTF-8 by default will double on-wire
length of file names in consideration.


-- 
HE CE3OH...

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