Re: [gnu.org #1363250] ASCII maintain.txt is no longer ASCII

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

(Please CC me, I'm not subscribed to bug-standards).

John Darrington wrote:
> * ASCII is a well defined standard, and all ASCII is UTF-8 (but the
>   converse is not true).
>
> *  The command iconv -f UTF-8 -t ASCII file will fail unless all the
>    characters in file are already ASCII.  Hence it isn't a very useful
>    command.
>
> * The coding standards say that we should prefer ASCII wherever
>   possible.  If it is not possible, then we should use UTF-8.
>
> I think that Therese is saying that there are some files which are using
> UTF-8 when ASCII would have sufficed.

Thanks. This is exactly what I meant. (Thérèse forwarded my question 
from webmasters to this list).

ASCII is the common subset of both UTF-8 and most single-byte charsets, 
specially ISO-8859-X. Coding 'maintain.txt' and 'maintain.info' in pure 
ASCII (as was done until some time ago) makes them backwards compatible 
with almost all machines and OSs at no cost.

This is specially important for 'maintain.info' because it can't be 
converted (the tag table becomes incorrect). Any user of a single-byte 
terminal will need to rebuild 'maintain.info' from source (as I need to 
do to see it in one of my machines).


Best regards,
Antonio.