[konsole] [Bug 395171] New: Remove UTF-16 and other non ASCII compatible encodings

[Egmont Koblinger]

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=395171

            Bug ID: 395171
           Summary: Remove UTF-16 and other non ASCII compatible encodings
           Product: konsole
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Other
                OS: Linux
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: minor
          Priority: NOR
         Component: general
          Assignee: konsole-devel at kde.org
          Reporter: egmont at gmail.com
  Target Milestone: ---

Non ASCII compatible encodings (UTF-16, UCS-2; not sure about UTF-7) should be
removed from the list of offered encodings.

Any valid character might easily include a byte in the 0x00 - 0x1F range, which
will trigger a special action according to the kernel's line discipline, such
as send interrupt to the foreground process, send EOF, newline, wipe out the
buffer etc., or just simply being echoed back in a way that's broken in UTF-16.

That is, the behavior is bound to be broken big time, there's nothing Konsole
could do to fix this.

The kernel expects the data on the terminal lines to be ASCII compatible.

I'm almost certain the Linux kernel doesn't support UTF-16 here, and I don't
think other Unixes do either. (If some does, offering this option should be
limited to these architectures.)

Let alone Konsole's UTF-16 mode inserts a BOM in front of every chunk of input,
which is also broken.

See
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/448745/strange-konsole-character-encoding-behavior/448774
for a related question and my more detailed answer.

(Bug 115113 might be relevant, UTF-16 support _may_ have been added as part of
that bug. Note however that while the summary of the bug mentions both UTF-8
and UTF-16, the description doesn't give any reason whatsoever why UTF-16 was
asked for.)

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