Re: Re-done kernel archive - real one?

From: David A. Wheeler <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>
Date: Apr 17, 2005, 18:44 UTC
Message-ID: <4262AE82.1070702@dwheeler.com>
In-Reply-To: <20050417192000.C13233@flint.arm.linux.org.uk>

>>On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Russell King wrote:
>>>>One thing which definitely needs to be considered is - what character
>>>>encoding are the comments to be stored as?

...

I replied:

>>I would _heartily_ recommend moving towards UTF-8 as the
>>internal charset for all comments.

Petr said:
 >Not that the plumbing should actually _care_ at all; anyone who uses it
 >should take the care, so this is more of a "social" thing.

The _plumbing_ shouldn't care, but the stuff above needs to know how to interpret the stuff that the plumbing produces.

Russell King said:

> Except, I believe, MicroEMACS, which both Linus and myself use.  As
> far as I know, there aren't any patches to make it UTF-8 compliant.

Since plain ASCII is a subset of UTF-8, as long as MicroEMACS users only create ASCII comments, then the comments you create in MicroEMACS will still be UTF-8. No big deal.

For reading comments, if the text is almost entirely plain ASCII, you could just ignore the problem and have the occasional character scramble. If you need more, you'll need a tool that's more internationalized or a working iconv, but if that's important you'd be motivated.

Again, I'm looking for more generalized solutions, where non-English comments are more common than in Linux kernel code.

--- David A. Wheeler