[NTLUG:Discuss] [Fwd: [linux-elitists]] Red Hat 9 Optimization]]

[David Simmons]

Alright...an answer from someone that works at RedHat:

> Ran it past some folks in development. I'm paraphrasing much of their
> responses. Feel free to pass this back to where you originally saw it.
> 
> > > A few reasons:
> > > 
> > > - - UTF-8 by default throughout the OS, including in the boot scripts;
> > > this
> > >   means odd and/or non-optimized collation rules etc. make sure you set
> > > "LANG=C" instead of "LANG=en_US.utf8".
> 
> LANG=C is a bad idea. What they want is LANG=en_US.ISO-8859-1 (our
> previous default).
> 
> LANG=C isn't 8-bit clean basically, while the Latin-1 locales are.
> Non-ASCII chars are considered "invalid" in LANG=C.
> 
> As for UTF-8, people are certainly free to run in whatever encoding
> they want, and it's one config file to change, but it's just
> hiding their head in the sand and pretending that the rest of the
> world doesn't exist. Plus, if we never converted to UTF-8, we'd
> never have found out what needed to be optimized.
> 
> Fedora Core 1 includes substantial optimizations to some of the system
> tools for operation in UTF-8 mode.
> 
> > > - - some horrible wchar_t patches applied to various things.  The RH9
> > >   version of Tcl/Tk, for example, uses 4x the RAM for text areas, due to
> > > a patch that makes them use wchar_t instead of char.   This
> > > *massively* screws up most useful Tk apps, like ExMH.
> 
> This is generally true.  UTF-8 support has been added as an
> afterthought to lots of text processing applications, and
> unfortunately no thought seems to have been given to efficiency in
> lots of cases.  An extreme example is grep: see bugzilla #69900.  Red
> Hat have reported a lot of these cases upstream, with a start at fixing
> it, to seemingly deaf ears.
> 
> There was an overwhelming consensus that people unhappy with things
> should post their issues to the Fedora mailing lists and help us get
> them resolved. Remember, Red Hat is not consciously trying to break and
> maim Linux. ;)
> 
> ~spot
> ---
> Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa(a)redhat*com> LCA, RHCE 
> Red Hat Sales Engineer || Aurora SPARC Linux Project Leader
> 
> "The author's mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is
> novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present
> social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to
> be published." -- Aldous Huxley
> 
> 
>