| |||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||
Re: Ubuntu DOES create somethingRe: Ubuntu DOES create somethingPosted Oct 21, 2008 2:09 UTC (Tue) by joey (subscriber, #328)In reply to: Re: Ubuntu DOES create something by jengelh Parent article: Fedora and long term support
"but consider for example the long-standing lack of UTF8-by-default in earlier Debian versions. This propagated, and now I am stuck for years with that issue in enterprises"
Debian is a vast collection of software. For a long time, much of this software had issues with utf-8. Debian and others performed a lot of work to fix various things to work with utf-8, and it eventually reached a point where Debian decided to enable utf-8 by default, since not too many things would break. (Although the number of utf-8 issues that remain is not exactly anywhere near nonzero... I seem to run into about 1 per week.)
You make it sound as if Debian perpretrated a lack of default utf-8 on the world somehow, which is a really strange reading of the above facts.
Furthermore, if Ubuntu chose to base off of a version of Debian that did not use utf-8 by default, there's no particular reason they couldn't revisit Debian's decision. Since the part of Ubuntu distributed on CD is about 21 times smaller than all of Debian, they could look at that subset, and, if it supported utf-8 well enough, make the switch. This ability to move quicker could be construed as one of the advantages Ubuntu can bring to its users. I don't remember if they significantly leapfrogged Debian in enabling utf-8 by default or not, but they certianly *could* have.
(Good greif, did you actually coax me into *defending* Ubuntu?)
(Log in to post comments)
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 21, 2008 2:32 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]
>Debian is a vast collection of software. For a long time, much of this software had issues with utf-8.
Hell I am not even talking about the vast software, but the base system. Simple stuff like the terminal being in utf8 mode and $LC_CTYPE being sth. like "en_US.UTF-8". I think it was Suse and Fedora that were among the first that I remember had utf8.
But you can also look at it another way if you don't like me pointing at Debian. Look at Slackware. If Debian is your standard definition of when features are complete and should be activated, then Slackware is quite late in enabling utf8.
>there's no particular reason they couldn't revisit Debian's decision [...]they could look at that subset, and, if it supported utf-8 well enough, make the switch.
Well that would have been a *real merit* if they did. But they did not do squat.
Re: Ubuntu DOES create something Posted Oct 21, 2008 8:22 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (subscriber, #1159) [Link] Ubuntu has defaulted to UTF-8 locales since 5.04 – the second release ever made. If you have a box that has old non-unicode locales set up, it'd be interesting to know how it got into that state. If you want to fix it you could try the recommendations in the 5.04 upgrade guide. For all the Ubuntu boxes I've set up in recent memory, unicode locales have been selected by default.
|
|
||||||||||||