i18n

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On Friday 17 March 2006 3:35 pm, Ed Hill wrote:
> 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.
That is up to people on this list.

> 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.
I never said that Linux does not support Unicode. Go back to the archives 
and read my post again. What I said was that the underlying character size 
is based on the C language 8-bit char. I also said that commercial Unixes 
adopted internationalization way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. 
And, what I wrote was absolutely true, but I do agree that it could have 
been misleading. While I was not on the I18N team, I worked with them 
frequently, I implemented some of this stuff in lint, cflow, cxref, lex and 
yacc since I was the guy that ported them to a 64-bit environment. 

I also have used and do use fully internationalized email clients for many 
years on Linux as I have been using Linux for over 10 years and Unix for 
over 25 years. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9