Re: Displaying characters in user's locale

[Karl Berry]

Hi Gavin,

    that is, not output encoding -

Good.

    I would think that we should leave files as they are if we don't
    know their encoding - that way we don't risk breaking something that
    works already.

Right.  So what do you mean by "the default file encoding is set to
UTF-8"?  What default?  If the default input enc is to leave it as is
(good), and the default output enc is set per the locale (good), what's
left?

    On the subject of interpreting ISO-8859 text as UTF-8 and passing
    through any unrecognized byte sequences, 

It definitely does fail.  It drops characters in practice, not just in
theory.  It's why I cannot use UTF-8 xterms.

karl