Re: [gentoo-user] ncurses; I think I wrecked my fresh install

["Walter Dnes" <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>]

On Tue, Dec 29, 2020 at 05:11:36PM +0200, Andreas K. Huettel wrote
> Hi Walter, 
> 
> > "-pch -roaming -sendmail -spell -tcpd -udev -udisks -unicode -upower
> > -xinerama"
> 
> mostly out of curiosity, why do you want to disable unicode support
> here?
> 
> This feels odd to me since utf8 has effectively become the standard
> encoding over the past years.

  I don't know if this has improved over the years, but my initial
experience with unicode was rather negative.  The fact that text
files were twice as large wasn't a major problem in itself.  The
real showstopper was that importing text files into spreadsheets
and text-editors and word processors failed miseraby.

  I looked at a unicode text file with a binary viewer.  It turns out
that a simple text string like "1234" was actually...

"1" binary-zero "2" binary-zero "3" binary-zero "4" binary zero, etc.

  This padding explains why the file was twice as large, and also why
"a simple textfile import" failed miserably.

  On top of that Cyrillic letters like "m", "i", "c", and "o" are
considered different from their English equivalants.  Security experts
showed proof-of-cocept attacks where clicking on "microsoft.com" can
take you to a hostile domain (queue the jokes).  I don't speak or read
or write any languages which have thousands of unique characters.
Seeing Chinese spam "as it was intended to be seen", is not a priority
for me.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@waltdnes.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications