Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] ok to install "locales" package on vcs.sv?

[Bob Proulx]

> Anyone know of a reason why I should not `apt-get install locales' on
> vcs.sv? I'd leave the default locale as "None", as it is now.

I think every system should have the locales package installed.  So
definitely installing it is the right thing to do.

(BTW: PAM uses the default locale setting for things that "log in" to
the system.  So in theory as I understand it the default locale should
only affect people who log in by some method through PAM.  This area
has been changing in recent years though and so I might be wrong now.
The desire would be to have the default as None which maps to C as you
have noted.)

>     It actually looks like the Savannah gecos data (real names etc) is in
>     latin-1 rather than utf-8; does anyone know if that is indeed the case?
>
> I do not know, but it wouldn't surprise me.

Probably an artifact of history.  As far as I know there is a
goal/vision in the Debian system that everything will be uniformly
UTF-8.  Therefore I assume that the gecos names would also be assumed
to be in UTF-8.  But it would have been easy for a cut-n-paste error
from history to have left some latin-1 encodings behind.

I think it would be reasonable to convert the encoding from latin-1 to
utf-8 if you had the time and resources to do it.  That would be great
and it would clean that part up.

Bob