Christian Weisgerber wrote:
 > Julian H. Stacey:
 > 
 > > 	I don't know about ISO 8859-1 and UTF-8, (I dislike & avoid
 > > 	national char set stuff as much as possible), but I want
 > 
 > That is your problem right there.
 
 My perspective & experience or `problem' as you mislabel it, is I
 was supporting Unix Internationalisation back in 1985, & long since
 tired of agravating German umlauts issues (Umlauts even back then
 had AE OE UE [& SS] replacements but few used them).
 
 Your problem is being German you had an incentive to attain umlauts,
 & probably being younger, wasted less time achieving umlauts going
 straight to the since available UTF; but myopic that others may be
 averse to waste more time for superflous national oddities that
 cleaner Roman derivatives like Italian & English etc find superfluous.
 
 It seemed best to make fmt.c 8 bit clean[er], to help process
 arbitrary text, harm no one, & not disturb users of eg UTF.
 
 Your problem is you would obstruct a cleaner fmt, so fmt continues
 to fail until users are forced to waste their time too like you did,
 reading & configuring internationalisation variables some don't need. **
 
 
 > > 	to be able to edit files that simultaneously contain eg all
 > > 	of English German & French etc, so setting some var to eg
 > > 	just German would be inappropriate.  8 bit clean would be ideal,
 > > 	next best would be my patches I suppose.
 > 
 > You MUST define a character set for this.  "8-bit clean" is meaningless
 > for a tool that deals with runs of characters.  Without a defined
 > character set, you have no idea what those bytes mean.  Is 0x90 a
 
 Not true. See below. **
 
 > printable character?  Is it a control character?  Is it part of a
 > multibyte character?
 > 
 > And setting, for example, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.ISO8859-1 does in no way
 > limit you to German.  For LC_CTYPE purposes, the language/country
 > part of the locale specification isn't used.
 > 
 > This is definitely a PEBKAC.
 
 Avoid junk acronyms.
 
 Re-Read original post 
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2010-May/031901.html
 
 Particularly:
         Example: Pasting notes into an xterm, clauses from
         http://seafrance.com in English then French original &
         German, to get the feel of what an unclear English translation
 
 **:
 Sometimes I mouse paste from Firefox in English, French, German &
 other languages, making notes in a single file with vi in an
 xterm, all with standard env. no Locale. & it edits OK in vi, &
 displays with cat in xterm, till !}fmt in vi wraps long lines,
 when fmt breaks it. So I fixed fmt.
 
 It would Not be appropriate to set a German locale, nor a French etc.
 Other utils might misbehave now or later See eg man sort re LC_ALL.
 
 No way I'd keep exiting vi & resetting LC_CTYPE between 
 mouse pastes from different language pages, The default American works fine.
 
 I'm not bothered if vi+xterm might mis-display some odd accent,
 as I can see something is there, so long as fmt does not strip the
 accent, but FreeBSD fmt.c Does strip the French accents & German
 umlauts, that's why I fixed fmt.c
 
 Summary:
  Making fmt.c 8 bit cleaner would not break UTF & unicode I believe
  so no reason to object to removal of fmt.c '& 0x7f' cruft etc.
 
 Cheers,
 Julian
 -- 
 Julian Stacey, BSD Unix Linux C Sys Eng Consultant, Munich http://berklix.com
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