The C locale

[Andy Koppe]

ps:
> Maximum 1.5 compatibility (what for and how long?)  vs. maximum
> default usability in the long run (at least I hope so).

Compatibilty for users upgrading to 1.7, who are used to being able to
use the non-ASCII chars in their ANSI codepage, which is usually all
they care about. And who have files encoded in that codepage, while
being blissfully unaware what stuff like "LC_CTYPE" or "CP1251" means.
And who are therefore going to complain about Cygwin 1.7 breaking
their files.

Using UTF-8 throughout is a worthwhile aim of course, but it's a bumpy
road to get there, with lots of apps not yet ready. Moreover, is there
actually any other OS where the "C" locale uses UTF-8? Afaik, Linuxes
just set LANG to *.UTF-8 somewhere in the startup scripts.

Andy

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