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OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

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Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#161

Post by ciupicri »

vacri wrote: post #130
kazinator wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, in America, people say things like "do you have plans for the weekend?" Or, "What did you do last weekend?" Nobody ever says, "Do you have plans for the upcoming two days which, respectively, constitute the end of this week and the start of the next one?" So, Americans and Brits are inconsistent. They have "the weekend" which is a block of two days when salaried people with regular working hours don't work; and…

Neither does anybody say "What are you doing for the holidays constituted of Christmas Day and selected other days around it?"

Christmas has 3 days.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#162

Post by joeyh »

ptx wrote: post #60
kragen wrote: post #3

I wonder what the pros and cons weighed in the discussion were. Clearly not supporting Unicode text in non-UTF-8 locales (except through, like, some kind of compatibility function, like recode or iconv) is the Right Thing. One problem that I have is that current UTF-8 implementations typically are not "8 bit clean", in the sense that GNU and modern Unix tools typically attempt to be; they crash, usually by throwing a…

Kuhn's idea is also used in in Python 3, so that garbage bytes can (optionally!) be decoded to Unicode strings and later losslessly turned back into the same bytes, which ensures (e.g.) that filenames that can't be decoded can still be used: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0383/

Same in haskell (ghc haskell at least).

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#163

Post by gpvos »

joshuapants wrote: post #113
dietrichepp wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yup, failure to use the metric system in everyday life is why the US has the worst scientists and produces the least scientific output. Oh, wait. Failure to use the metric system everywhere cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter just 16 years ago, and yet here you are, insisting that this is not a problem, and throwing in a non sequitur to justify the position.

> Failure to use the metric system everywhere cost NASA a $125 million Mars orbiter No, bureaucratic failure to address the concerns of people who spotted the error well in advance of the launch cost NASA $125M. The investigation report makes that clear, especially when it goes on to make recommendations for avoiding future mishap; nobody recommended that the engineers needed to brush up on their units. And yet here…

Using metric everywhere would have avoided this particular mistake. Although indeed, the bureaucracy would probably have let some other error slip through (like mistaking cm for mm).

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#164

Post by minikites »

ymse wrote: post #117
nawitus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTC is (as everyone knows) a bit problematic due to leap seconds. Different software systems handle the leap seconds somewhat differently. Handling leap seconds is is actually quite difficult if you want to get it absolutely correct. In 99% of cases the problems are just ignored (e.g. "it doesn't matter if the chart is slightly odd looking when you look at the moment of the leap second"). There's also the problem tha…

I'd be happy just to get rid of DST.

DST is great and the reasons I think that are nicely summed up here: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2013/03/why-i-like-dst/

> If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July.

> If, by the way, you think the solution is to stay on DST throughout the year, I can only tell you that we tried that back in the 70s and it didn’t turn out well. Sunrise here in Chicago was after 8:00 am, which put school children out on the street at bus stops before dawn in the dead of winter.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#165

Post by JD557 »

readstoomuch wrote: post #88
nawitus wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UTC is (as everyone knows) a bit problematic due to leap seconds. Different software systems handle the leap seconds somewhat differently. Handling leap seconds is is actually quite difficult if you want to get it absolutely correct. In 99% of cases the problems are just ignored (e.g. "it doesn't matter if the chart is slightly odd looking when you look at the moment of the leap second"). There's also the problem tha…

Was ist GoogleTime?

I don't have a source at hand but, IIRC, instead of having leap seconds, Google slightly dilates each second to compensate for that. The time eventually corrects itself.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#166

Post by ape4 »

cpeterso wrote: post #144
RexRollman wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I wish everyone used the 24:00 clock. Maybe the military has messed me up, but I really prefer seeing something like 18:22 over 6:22pm. It just seems simplier.

Plus people format 12 hour times inconsistently: 6:00pm 6:00PM 6:00 PM 6:00 P.M. 6PM or just 6:00

There is something to be said for the french style 18h00. So when you see the "h" you know its 24-hour time. With the colon you aren't sure if its 12 or 24 hour time.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#167

Post by witty_username »

masklinn wrote: post #143
kstrauser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crashing in the "/* oops! */ exit(1)" sense is great. Crashing in the buffer overflow sense is not. OpenBSD treats all of the latter as potential security vulnerabilities.

No objection there, "crashing" in my comment was meant as "stops processing and report an input data error to the user", the erlang sense of crashing if you will.

Aborting might be the better term.

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#168

Post by protomyth »

dietrichepp wrote: post #101
protomyth wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd prefer to skip metric and redefine the foot as the distance light travels in a nanosecond ~ 11.8 inches. The length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299792458 of a second seems a bit arbitrary to me. I would also vote for any candidate that would ban anything but powers of 2 in the definition of computer storage.

I don't get the fascination with powers of two in storage. RAM I understand, because you're counting address lines. But storage? What sense does that make? I have an SD card with 16.0 GB of space available, and I'm recording video at 9.00 Mbit/s. How many hours of footage? Well, (16.0e3 MB) * (8 bit/B) / (9.00 Mbit/s) = 1.42e4 s, or 3.95 hours. Now do the computation with binary units. I have an SD card with 14.9 GiB…

If its 200Mbytes in RAM, it should be the the same on a disk. Also, a sector is 512bytes of 4096bytes, so the labeling it in powers of 10 actually makes the math worse.

Why make people do extra math? Shouldn't we choose units that make things easier to calculate, not harder?

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#169

Post by kuschku »

gpvos wrote: post #141
kuschku wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The financial year assumes 30 days per month, 12 months per year, 360 days per year. That’s what’s the basis for your salary calculation.

Indeed I'm paid the same amount every month. Yet I'm paid on the same day of every 28/29/30/31-day month, i.e., with slightly varying intervals. The differences between the months are currently small enough that it doesn't really matter much, and it always evens out the next month. But if suddenly a wild week appears, I will want to get paid for that week. Either that, or everyone will need to keep to a parallel trad…

Why would you want to get paid for that week?

You don’t get paid for January 31st, March 31st, May 31st, July 31st, August 31st, October 31st or December 31st either. (Actually, you get paid for 2 of them. Still leaves 5 days a year without pay, 6 days in leap years).

So, why should you get more? Just because you feel like you deserve it?

Re: OpenBSD removes support for non-UTF8 locales

#170

Post by protomyth »

Asbostos wrote: post #138
protomyth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take one level over two levels. Besides, memorizing that metric fraction is just wrong. Plus, do we really want to go into space with a unit of measure whose origins are tied to the size of the Earth? Let's at least free part of the definition from an Earth-centric bias. I fear a Mars-centric meter might develop.

Unlikely. The metric units have a long history of never having been redefined in a way that breaks previous usage. As far as I'm aware, all redefinitions have just improved the precision, so they don't hurt previous users. Your proposal would make all the old feet wrong and anybody seeing "foot" would have to think about which type of foot it might me.

Oh, I don't know, I bet the future Mars independence movement will try to throw off all the shackles of Earth and switch their units of measure. I jest just a bit, but its not like we humans don't pull stunts like this all the time in the spirit of independence.

My proposal is basically the engineering estimate of foot. I would probably name it something different if I were Emperor / Very Powerful Politician. Its small enough to derive the mass and volume units directly.

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