[aklug] Re: What should I consider before doing an install?

On Sat, 2 Jul 2011, Royce Williams wrote:

> True enough. It's clear that there's no real use case for your
> situations, Arthur. It also keeps things very, very simple - and simple
> is good, and is a goal of Nevaeh, IIRC. :-)

True, but it's not like Neaveh doesn't support Unicode, it does. I just
don't care about it or use it. You can still support Unicode at the
application layer and not have to support it at the system layer, and I do
have some applications that do so... but, again, I couldn't care less if
they didn't.

> Batting around the pros and cons ... given that UTF-8 is
> backwards-compatible with 8-bit ASCII -- virtually indistinguishable
> until you use a non-ASCII sequence, which starts with a special preamble
> -- there are no real drawbacks in my view other than:
>
> * A little bit of (admittedly constant, but probably efficient)
> interpretation overhead, watching for that preamble, and
>
> * Some security risk around the fact that you can be presented with
> letters that look exactly like the letters you think you're getting, but
> are actually Cyrillic, etc.

I wouldn't call it "some" security risk. Knowing you have to validate the
7-bit character set as strictly one byte inputs, while watching for up to
six byte characters otherwise is not trivial. The performance penalty
should be obvious as well.

No, for CLI programs, etc., it's far easier to validate and harden purely on
ASCII. And I'm not sure I'm willing to trust the various translation layers
available, either.

> If you want to leave the door open to developing anything that might
> need to capture non-English text (internationalization of an app or web
> site, for example), then I'd go UTF-8. Otherwise, there's probably no
> real reason to other than the novelty/interest of being able to natively
> use a plethora ("Yes, Jefe, you have a plethora!") of cool characters,
> both international and otherwise (as CH said).

Ahh, but your argument only holds water if you a plethora as part of a
command-line arguments, file names, etc., at the system level. There's
nothing stopping you from having a C-locale system with no filesystem
unicode support and still getting them in firefox, abiword, etc.

;-) I'm not adverse to caring, but I have yet to see a compelling argument
to date...

         --Arthur Corliss
           Live Free or Die
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Received on Sun Jul 3 09:11:08 2011