linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

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Message-ID: <2ae366fdff4bd5910a2270823e8da70521c859af.camel@infradead.org>
Date:   Mon, 10 May 2021 11:54:02 +0100
From:   David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>
To:     Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@...nel.org>,
        Linux Doc Mailing List <linux-doc@...r.kernel.org>
Cc:     linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        alsa-devel@...a-project.org, coresight@...ts.linaro.org,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

On Mon, 2021-05-10 at 12:26 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> There are several UTF-8 characters at the Kernel's documentation.
> 
> Several of them were due to the process of converting files from
> DocBook, LaTeX, HTML and Markdown. They were probably introduced
> by the conversion tools used on that time.
> 
> Other UTF-8 characters were added along the time, but they're easily
> replaceable by ASCII chars.
> 
> As Linux developers are all around the globe, and not everybody has UTF-8
> as their default charset, better to use UTF-8 only on cases where it is really
> needed.

No, that is absolutely the wrong approach.

If someone has a local setup which makes bogus assumptions about text
encodings, that is their own mistake.

We don't do them any favours by trying to *hide* it in the common case
so that they don't notice it for longer.

There really isn't much excuse for such brokenness, this far into the
21st century.

Even *before* UTF-8 came along in the final decade of the last
millennium, it was important to know which character set a given piece
of text was encoded in.

In fact it was even *more* important back then, we couldn't just assume
UTF-8 everywhere like we can in modern times.

Git can already do things like CRLF conversion on checking files out to
match local conventions; if you want to teach it to do character set
conversions too then I suppose that might be useful to a few developers
who've fallen through a time warp and still need it. But nobody's ever
bothered before because it just isn't necessary these days.

Please *don't* attempt to address this anachronistic and esoteric
"requirement" by dragging the kernel source back in time by three
decades.

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