[darcs-users] [darcs-devel] [patch639] Use utf-8 charset for darcs send in case of non-ascii ...

[Juliusz Chroboczek]

I've been seriously trying to refrain from participating in this
discussion.  It's amazing how encoding-related issues bring out the
beast in otherwise reasonable people.

> I'm seriously amazed to read such a post coming from a darcs
> developer. Considering the elegance of the darcs system, there is no
> place for such immature and vengeful approaches to solving a problem.

If I read him right, Gabriel has suggested adding code to abort in
non-UTF-8 locales in order to check whether we have any users running
systems that haven't been updated since the 20th century.  This is not
about ``punishing'' people, it's about checking whether tehre are any
trilobites left.

For the record, we started pushing the "UTF-8 everywhere" approach to
Unix programming in the late 1990s.  I was flamed to death (both by our
Japanese users and by Sun's developers) when I drastically simplified
the locale support from XTerm (and fixed it while at it, but that's
another story).  I'm still scarred by the introduction of the locale-
independent UTF-8 APIs into XLib.  My head still hurts from having had
to explain why UTF8_STRING is better than COMPOUND_TEXT so many times.
(Stephen: and why the bug is in Emacs/MULE, not in the UTF8_STRING
definition.  Please send me your ICBM coordinates by private mail.)

It's been almost 15 years, and it's high time we helped the few people
still in locale hell.  The first step is to make them realise that they
have a problem.

-- Juliusz