UTF-8 locale (was: Strange bug in QSvgRenderer and KDE)

Thiago Macieira thiago at kde.org
Sat Jul 7 18:49:21 BST 2007


Oswald Buddenhagen wrote:
>> Reason (one of many, but this one I can speak authoritatively for):
>> URLs are always encoded in UTF-8. Which means that they are encoded in
>> UTF-8 for local files too.
>
>this argument does not make sense. urls and the system locale are
>different namespaces. actually, filenames and the terminal (==
>LC_MESSAGES) should be different namespaces as well, but i don't think
>this is supported by LC_* - gtk has an own env var for filenames.

This is not a joke. It's high-time people switched. 

A new desktop environment seems like a good time to do it. I abandoned zsh 
5 years ago when I switched to UTF-8 and it didn't support my locale. 
Only recently have I switched back, due to its recent support.

You can have a non UTF-8 environment as long as you keep all files you 
access strictly under ASCII. Do not attempt to use any codepoints > 
U+007F. It may fail bizarrely, as they are converted to and from URLs.

With Qt 4.3.0, they'll simply not work because of a bug. When that bug is 
fixed, it'll probably be just Konqueror unable to display local pages 
with non-UTF-8 references.

What's more, the "file:///" XDG spec requires those URLs to contain the 
exact byte representation of the file name on disk (8 bit). The IRI spec 
(which we give preference to) requires all URLs to be encoded in UTF-8. 
The only way to have both being respected is to have the local system in 
UTF-8.

Sorry, just switch. I feel no pity for those old applications without 
UTF-8 support.
-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
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