linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2 00/40] Use ASCII subset instead of UTF-8 alternate symbols

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Date:   Wed, 12 May 2021 18:07:04 +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>,
        Mali DP Maintainers <malidp@...s.arm.com>,
        alsa-devel@...a-project.org, coresight@...ts.linaro.org,
        dri-devel@...ts.freedesktop.org, intel-gfx@...ts.freedesktop.org,
        intel-wired-lan@...ts.osuosl.org, keyrings@...r.kernel.org,
        kvm@...r.kernel.org, linux-acpi@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org, linux-edac@...r.kernel.org,
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Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 00/40] Use ASCII subset instead of UTF-8 alternate
 symbols

Your title 'Use ASCII subset' is now at least a bit *closer* to
describing what the patches are actually doing, but it's still a bit
misleading because you're only doing it for *some* characters.

And the wording is still indicative of a fundamentally *misguided*
motivation for doing any of this. Your commit comments should be about
fixing a specific thing, nothing to do with "use ASCII subset", which
is pointless in itself.

On Wed, 2021-05-12 at 14:50 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> Such conversion tools - plus some text editor like LibreOffice  or similar  - have
> a set of rules that turns some typed ASCII characters into UTF-8 alternatives,
> for instance converting commas into curly commas and adding non-breakable
> spaces. All of those are meant to produce better results when the text is
> displayed in HTML or PDF formats.

And don't we render our documentation into HTML or PDF formats? Are
some of those non-breaking spaces not actually *useful* for their
intended purpose?

> While it is perfectly fine to use UTF-8 characters in Linux, and specially at
> the documentation,  it is better to  stick to the ASCII subset  on such
> particular case,  due to a couple of reasons:
> 
> 1. it makes life easier for tools like grep;

Barely, as noted, because of things like line feeds.

> 2. they easier to edit with the some commonly used text/source
>    code editors.

That is nonsense. Any but the most broken and/or anachronistic
environments and editors will be just fine.

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