Re: Eclipse

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From: jrodman
Subject: Re: Eclipse
Date: 21:47 on 01 Nov 2006
On Wed, Nov 01, 2006 at 12:24:06PM -0800, Patrick Quinn-Graham wrote:
> On 1-Nov-06, at 12:10 PM, David Cantrell wrote:
> 
> >[...]
> >If Unicode is so well-supported then I jolly well  expect it to Just
> >Work.  It doesn't. 
> >[...]
>
> [...]
> I have a computer that's quite capable of  handling unicode with no
> apparent problems whatsoever (including  "just working").
> [...]
> My linux box at  (my last) work I used for about a year seemed to
> handle it perfectly well too.

I suppose you were using one of the Linuxes that has a policy of
providing "pleasant defaults".  A view I wish I could find more than
around 2% of the time in the software domain.

My poison-of-choice, Debian, has a general policy of providing minimal
defaults.  That is the program's behavior without configuration files,
in most cases anyway.  (Full disclosure: I don't know if this is a real
policy or just common practice on this distro, additionally I'm sure
this informal policy is broken at the worst possible times.)  It's
harder to go as far wrong with minimal, as with sumptuous configuration,
but it means the warts in the software are not papered over in the
manner your Linux of choice managed with env variables that wonderfully
break down in some situations.

Result, my default locale is the same as that named "C".  In other
words, nonascii characters will never be displayed by compliant
programs.

I actually configured my local machine to support ISO-8859-1 many years
ago--one of the reasons that Unicode does not excite me.  Hooray for
data migration (filenames, config file contents, TAGS on file formats
stupid enough to put the metadata in custom binary formats, and so on).
However, the colocated Debian mail host I use--which I installed only a
year or so ago--is still set up with no locale save the default (ascii),
and moreover somehow ssh or Debian conspires not to bring my locale
across when I ssh, as if my terminal would become less capable of
character display because ssh is involved in the datastream.

I'm sure there are situations where you wouldn't want the locale to be
transferred across, but getting back to those sane defaults...

It's amazing how infrequently software authors care about getting things
right to start, instead of providing lots of twiddly knobs and files to
ask the software to not be stupid.  

  (Speaking of which, some software on this computer does not obey
   $XDG_DATA_HOME, resulting in ~/.local/share/Trash/files being created
   despite it, in addition to ~/data/Trash/files and ~/.Trash.  Please
   all you idiot developers, stop creating dotted directories.)

Sometimes it's just too much work to cut through all the idiocy to
figure out who is guilty in what amounts.

-josh
There's stuff above here

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