i18n

[ed at eh3.com (Ed Hill)]

On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 12:52 -0500, David Hummel wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 17, 2006 at 12:35:40PM -0500, Bill Horne wrote:
> > 
> > Ed Hill wrote:
> > 
> > >On Fri, 2006-03-17 at 08:55 -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> > > 
> > >>The problem with Unix/Linux is that it is still based on 8-bit
> > >>characters,
> > >
> > >The above, as written, is simply not true.
> > 
> > I didn't see anything to disagree with in Jerry's posting, 
> 
> Jerry's statement above is misleading.  It's not really a problem, since
> the user interacts not with the kernel, but with applications.  glibc
> has had support for utf-8 and multi-byte locales for years now (since
> 2.2 I believe).

I'm really surprised that people see this issue as having two sides. 

Clearly, Linux (in both the broad sense of a Linux distro and the narrow
sense of a kernel--where streams of bytes are, after all, just streams
of bytes that may represent Unicode-encoded characters or anything else)
supports Unicode.  Folks use it routinely.  I'm sitting here on a Linux
laptop typing this email into a client that supports Unicode and other
encodings (evolution) and their display through various fonts.  Its not
something that begs for any meaningful debate.

And in terms of apologies (as suggest by a previous poster), I'm not
about to do so.  I think that what Jerry wrote was complete and utter
nonsense.  Particularly for a list that is supposed to help Linux users
of all skill levels.  Telling folks that Linux doesn't support Unicode
is simply untrue and totally unproductive.

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
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