linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 06/53] docs: admin-guide: avoid using UTF-8 chars

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Date:   Wed, 12 May 2021 10:25:35 +0100
From:   David Woodhouse <dwmw2@...radead.org>
To:     Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@...nel.org>,
        Gabriel Krisman Bertazi <krisman@...labora.com>
Cc:     Linux Doc Mailing List <linux-doc@...r.kernel.org>,
        "Daniel W. S. Almeida" <dwlsalmeida@...il.com>,
        Jonathan Corbet <corbet@....net>,
        Arnd Bergmann <arnd@...db.de>, Borislav Petkov <bp@...en8.de>,
        David Howells <dhowells@...hat.com>,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        James Morse <james.morse@....com>,
        Kees Cook <keescook@...omium.org>,
        Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@...nel.org>,
        Robert Richter <rric@...nel.org>,
        Thorsten Leemhuis <linux@...mhuis.info>,
        Tony Luck <tony.luck@...el.com>, keyrings@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-edac@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 06/53] docs: admin-guide: avoid using UTF-8 chars

On Wed, 2021-05-12 at 10:44 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> The main point here is that a large amount of those UTF-8 characters
> appeared as result of document conversion from DocBook/LaTeX/Markdown.
> 
> As the conversion ended, I don't expect the need of re-doing a series
> like that in the near future.
> 
> There are even some cases where the UTF-8 were doing wrong things, like
> using an EN DASH instead of an hyphen in order to pass a command line
> parameter, and the addition of non-printable BOM characters.
> 
> So, IMO, this is a necessarily cleanup after the conversion.

That part — fixing characters that are *wrong*, such as converting a
UTF-8 U+2014 EM DASH to a UTF-8 U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, is reasonable
enough.

But you're not "avoiding using UTF-8 chars" there, as it says in the
title of this patch. HYPHEN-MINUS encoded as 0x2D *is* UTF-8.

I think you meant "avoid using non-ASCII chars", and even *that* is an
entirely bogus reason for doing anything at all, as discussed.

Limit yourself to fixing characters which are actually wrong, and it's
fine. One level of pointless trivia below spelling errors, mind you,
but at least not actively wrong.

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