On Friday 27 July 2012 08:13:16 ChÃ*-Thanh Christopher Nguyá»…n wrote:
> Ulrich Mueller schrieb:
> > As I had pointed out before [1], changing from POSIX to an en_US
> > locale will have undesirable side effects, like commas as thousands
> > separators in numbers (because of LC_NUMERIC). Also the defaults of
> > en_US for LC_MEASUREMENT and LC_PAPER are only useful in the U.S.
> >
> > So if we change the default (but I still don't see the need), we
> >
> > should go for a less intrusive setting like:
> > LANG="POSIX"
> > LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
>
> This would be better than LANG="en_US.utf8" but I would still prefer not
> to have any country/region attached to the locale. The C.UTF-8 locale
> which Debian uses for this purpose (a UTF-8 locale without side effects)
> appears more suitable to me.

yes, and i'm waiting on the POSIX group to formalize C.UTF-8. that's the only
real option in my mind for making unicode the default. any other
amalgamations of various locales is ugly as sin.
-mike

El vie, 27-07-2012 a las 13:24 -0400, Mike Frysinger escribió:
> On Friday 27 July 2012 08:13:16 ChÃ*-Thanh Christopher Nguyá»…n wrote:
> > Ulrich Mueller schrieb:
> > > As I had pointed out before [1], changing from POSIX to an en_US
> > > locale will have undesirable side effects, like commas as thousands
> > > separators in numbers (because of LC_NUMERIC). Also the defaults of
> > > en_US for LC_MEASUREMENT and LC_PAPER are only useful in the U.S.
> > >
> > > So if we change the default (but I still don't see the need), we
> > >
> > > should go for a less intrusive setting like:
> > > LANG="POSIX"
> > > LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
> >
> > This would be better than LANG="en_US.utf8" but I would still prefer not
> > to have any country/region attached to the locale. The C.UTF-8 locale
> > which Debian uses for this purpose (a UTF-8 locale without side effects)
> > appears more suitable to me.
>
> yes, and i'm waiting on the POSIX group to formalize C.UTF-8. that's the only
> real option in my mind for making unicode the default. any other
> amalgamations of various locales is ugly as sin.
> -mike

Do you have any idea about how much time could that formalization take?
If it will take a long time, maybe we could go to that amalgamations :-/

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On 07/27/2012 02:29 PM, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> El vie, 27-07-2012 a las 13:24 -0400, Mike Frysinger escribió:
>> On Friday 27 July 2012 08:13:16 ChÃ*-Thanh Christopher Nguyá»…n
>> wrote:
>>> Ulrich Mueller schrieb:
>>>> As I had pointed out before [1], changing from POSIX to an
>>>> en_US locale will have undesirable side effects, like commas
>>>> as thousands separators in numbers (because of LC_NUMERIC).
>>>> Also the defaults of en_US for LC_MEASUREMENT and LC_PAPER
>>>> are only useful in the U.S.
>>>>
>>>> So if we change the default (but I still don't see the need),
>>>> we
>>>>
>>>> should go for a less intrusive setting like: LANG="POSIX"
>>>> LC_CTYPE="en_US.utf8"
>>>
>>> This would be better than LANG="en_US.utf8" but I would still
>>> prefer not to have any country/region attached to the locale.
>>> The C.UTF-8 locale which Debian uses for this purpose (a UTF-8
>>> locale without side effects) appears more suitable to me.
>>
>> yes, and i'm waiting on the POSIX group to formalize C.UTF-8.
>> that's the only real option in my mind for making unicode the
>> default. any other amalgamations of various locales is ugly as
>> sin. -mike
>
> Do you have any idea about how much time could that formalization
> take? If it will take a long time, maybe we could go to that
> amalgamations :-/
>

Really, how much of an inconvenience is it that we don't use UTF-8 as
a default?

In my mind, it is sufficient that we instruct users how to set the
locale in the handbook.

No user will be happy with whatever we decide to use as a default. I
will be especially upset if we use the metric system instead of the
*STANDARD* system. It has 'standard' in the name for a reason people.
(^_^)

- --
Mr. Aaron W. Swenson
Gentoo Linux Developer
Email : titanofold@gentoo.org
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Il 27/07/2012 13:16, Aaron W. Swenson ha scritto:
> Really, how much of an inconvenience is it that we don't use UTF-8 as
> a default?

Given that there are a ton and a half of Python packages that do not
work with a non-utf8 locale, I'd say it's quite a thing.

So either we go with an UTF-8 default or somebody has to fix the
packages not working without it....

--
Diego Elio Pettenò — Flameeyes
flameeyes@flameeyes.eu — http://blog.flameeyes.eu/

On 07/27/12 16:16, Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
>
> No user will be happy with whatever we decide to use as a default.

The defaults should be what's best for the most people, with a bias
towards safety. Why don't we just take a survey and choose the most
common utf8 response?

On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:35:36 -0400
Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:

> On 07/27/12 16:16, Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
> >
> > No user will be happy with whatever we decide to use as a default.
>
> The defaults should be what's best for the most people, with a bias
> towards safety. Why don't we just take a survey and choose the most
> common utf8 response?

How can you take a survey like that? How will you ensure it actually
hits the majority? How will you define the majority?

--
Best regards,
Michał Górny

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
> On 07/27/12 16:16, Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
>>
>> No user will be happy with whatever we decide to use as a default.
>
> The defaults should be what's best for the most people, with a bias
> towards safety. Why don't we just take a survey and choose the most
> common utf8 response?

You'd really want to a "which do you prefer, which can you use"
survey, then; You don't really want to choose the result preferred by
the most people, rather you want the result which is usable by the
most people.

--
:wq

On 07/30/12 10:41, Michał Górny wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:35:36 -0400
> Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>
>> On 07/27/12 16:16, Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
>>>
>>> No user will be happy with whatever we decide to use as a default.
>>
>> The defaults should be what's best for the most people, with a bias
>> towards safety. Why don't we just take a survey and choose the most
>> common utf8 response?
>
> How can you take a survey like that? How will you ensure it actually
> hits the majority? How will you define the majority?
>

Considering that the alternative is to force everyone to change it
manually, you can do it however you want and it'll be an improvement.

1) Create a webpage with a bunch of options, count the results

2) Ask the g.o mailing lists, count responses manually

3) Use google docs like the website survey that went out a few days
ago

It won't hit everyone, but no survey ever does. As long as you get a
large enough unbiased sample, it doesn't matter. And anything would be
an improvement, so it doesn't matter anyway.

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 10:41 AM, Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2012 10:35:36 -0400
> Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:
>
>> On 07/27/12 16:16, Aaron W. Swenson wrote:
>> >
>> > No user will be happy with whatever we decide to use as a default.
>>
>> The defaults should be what's best for the most people, with a bias
>> towards safety. Why don't we just take a survey and choose the most
>> common utf8 response?
>
> How can you take a survey like that? How will you ensure it actually
> hits the majority? How will you define the majority?

Serverside script on gentoo.org. Push out a news item with the URL and
a last-call date. Tabulate the results, using browser fingerprints to
weed out the bulk of duplicates.

--
:wq

On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You'd really want to a "which do you prefer, which can you use"
> survey, then; You don't really want to choose the result preferred by
> the most people, rather you want the result which is usable by the
> most people.

I tend to agree. Donnie said something in his manifesto which I think
applies here: any of the proposed solutions is probably better than
doing nothing.

If I forget to tweak my locale and I end up with a comma as a decimal
mark it isn't the end of the world, and neither is some output in
metric units. I've ended up working on many a global system where
times get reported in GMT and people put up with the inconvenience
because they realize that any standard is better than no standard.

What is the real end-user impact of any of this stuff anyway? During
the install the thing that matters is being able to partition disks
and compile kernels and such. I doubt that too many users will be
dependent on installer locale settings for displaying weather reports
or such. If they don't set locale, then it is like not setting
localtime - you just get to live with some default. I would imagine
that at least by having a UTF-8 locale users would be able to do
things like set full names of users using unicode, etc.

Rich