GNU bug report logs - #22838
New 'Binary file' detection considered harmful

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From: Hans Pelleboer <hanspelleboer <at> online.nl>
To: 22838 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#22838: New 'Binary file' detection considered harmful
Date: Tue, 1 Mar 2016 05:01:55 +0100

On 03/01/2016 12:55 AM, Eric Blake wrote:
> I _think_ the Austin Group is leaning towards requiring the "C" locale 
> to always be a unibyte locale with all 256 bytes as valid characters, 
> so neither strict 7-bit ASCII nor UTF-8 would be usable as the "C" 
> locale; but for that to happen, POSIX would also need to allow a way 
> to get a UTF-8 locale easily accessible and 
You do realize that this leaves all _non-US_users_, who rely on 
diacritics or even different character sets entirely
for their language, completely out in the cold.

> describe how it differs from the "C" locale under such a ruling. But 
> it's still all conjecture on what the final results will be - even in 
> the standards committee, gracefully documenting how locale corner 
> cases must behave vs. leaving implementations some latitude is tricky 
> business; and any such change is at least 3 or 4 years down the road 
> before it could be standardized in Issue 8 (right now, the focus is on 
> Technical Corrigendum 2 for Issue 7). 
Already back in _1987_, an IT professor in Leiden was especially 
appointed for the streamlining of
all the competing character sets that later were merged to become 
Unicode. Given the current
state of affairs, nearly thirty years down the road, I do not share your 
optimism that this issue
will be resolved in the next couple of years.

Hans Pelleboer

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