From: Stephane Bortzmeyer (bortzmeyer@nic.fr)
Date: Tue Oct 21 2003 - 06:43:43 CST
On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 10:14:22PM +0200,
Stefan Persson <alsjebegrijptwatikbedoel@yahoo.se> wrote
a message of 23 lines which said:
> >Just wondering if anybody knowss how unicode is on Linux?
> >
> Very good support.
Very optimistic.
Kernel
*****
1) File names in Unicode: no (well, the Linux kernel is 8-bits clean
so you can always encode in UTF-8, but the kernel does not do any
normalization and the applications do not expect UTF-8, for instance
ls sorts alphabetically but dot not know Unicode sorting).
2) User names: worse since utilities to create an account refuses
UTF-8.
Applications
************
3) grep: no Unicode regexp
4) xterm (or similar virtual terminals): No BiDi support at all
5) shells: I'm not aware of any line-editing shell (zsh, tcsh)
that have Unicode character semantics (back-character should move one
character, not one byte)
6) databases: I'm not aware of a free DBMS which has support for
Unicode sorting (SQL's ORDER BY) or regexps (SQL's LIKE).
7) Serious word processing: LaTeX has only very minimum Unicode
Also, many applications (exmh, emacs) are ten times slower when
running in UTF-8 mode.
At the present time, using Unicode on Unix is an act of faith.
> Default charset for recent versions of some popular distributions.
Yes, RedHat changed the default charset to Unicode without thinking
that text files were no longer readable.
See:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
ftp://ftp.ilog.fr/pub/Users/haible/utf8/Unicode-HOWTO.html
http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/debian-utf8/howto.html
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