Debian switching to EGLIBC

Programs still need to know what language the user(s) of the system prefer to see responses in, if their radix mark is a ',' or a '.', if they count days using the Gregorian or Chinese calendar, etc.

I agree that the world would be a brighter place if it could be said "all text on disk or streamed on the network MUST be in Unicode's UTF-8 encoding" and then locales could just say "en_US" instead of "en_US-UTF-8" but issues of representation and encoding are only half of the localization problem.