Is it time to consider making the utf-8 encoding the default character encoding in FreeBSD? Most other OSs have moved to utf-8 over the last few years. We remain somewhat behind in this respect, which is odd, considering the wide international participation in the FreeBSD community. It's not much work to do this. The notes in the link I posted and the earlier message which started this thread suggest where work still needs to be done: - ncurses in the base system will need updating to a current version with wide-character support - we may need to update the base fonts so that more iso10646 ones have more complete character support - some work will need to be done to fix wide-character related bugs in a few utilities, e.g., nvi - utf-8 will have to be made the default character encoding in startup scripts for the various utilities and ports that are affected - there may be a number of files on the system which will need iconv'ing from iso8859 to utf-8 - the FreeBSD Handbook will need updating Such a change would be transparent for folk still using only 7-bit text. Folk with 8-bit text stored as 8859 will have to convert all such files to utf-8 so they'll need some sort of head's up when we change the system default. If there's interest, I can help coordinate a ToDo list to track what needs to be done. -jr
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