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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Juliusz Chroboczek writes:

 > 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.

No, the bug was in XFree86, and perhaps derivatives.  Those of us
working outside of the X dev community use the ICCCM, not the source,
as the reference whenever possible.  UTF8_STRING was *not documented*
in that standard at the time.  It is a bug when the developers
advocate use of a wire protocol that is not documented in the
definition of the wire protocol.  Do you disagree?

 > It's been almost 15 years, and it's high time we helped the few people
 > still in locale hell.

The Chinese also have a "multiple locales in one locality" issue,
though it's not as severe as the Japanese one.  I suspect the Indians
are in better shape, but maybe not.  Your definition of "few" does not
make sense to me.

 > The first step is to make them realise that they have a problem.

They *know* they have a problem.  (With the exception of a few
crackpots like Mr. "The Japanese Language is Now in Great Danger [from
Unicode]!" Ohta.)  But their problem is not locale hell -- generally
they (or their tech staffs) know what they want to do about that, in
the long run.  Their problem is OPI (Other People's Infrastructure).
The coordination problem of getting everybody to change at once is not
so easy to solve.