Bug 1028988

Bug #1020619 resulted from a customer who tried to run GNOME in a non-UTF-8 encoding, and it Didn't Go Well :)

I posted a comment there, along the lines of this:

1. GNOME is *not* written to work in any other encoding than UTF-8.  Everything assumes UTF-8.  Code shouldn't blow up if it is passed invalid UTF-8, of course (e.g. through corrupted data or through a data file with another encoding), but this is different than trying to run the environment itself in a non-UTF-8 encoding.

2. If the customer really requires running an application / in-house system / whatever in a locale-specific encoding, they should isolate it and run *only that* with the locale-specific encoding, not all of GNOME.  They can do this with a shell script along the lines of

  #!/bin/sh

  export LANG=de_DE@euro
  /opt/legacy/whatever $*

3. Please tell customers to *not* uncheck Yast's "use UTF-8 encoding" checkbox.  This is probably a holdover from many moons ago, but we've been writing software to use only UTF-8 only for more than 15 years now :)


To summarize: software shouldn't crash if it gets a data file in an unexpected character encoding.  However, we've been writing software whose *internal representation* of data is in UTF-8, for many years now.

YaST still includes a checkbox, "Use UTF-8 encoding" in the Details window of the Languages panel, that makes it possible to turn off UTF-8 for the whole environment.  I think we should remove this in 2017 :)