[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#765886: Bug#765886: Bug#765886: Bug#765886: sbuild: [PATCH] Replaced all unicode-printed chars with plain ASCII

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi,

Quoting Lennart Sorensen (2015-10-05 18:33:42)
> The unicode boxes make the build log MUCH more readable in my opinion,

unfortunately this is not a very hard argument as "readability" is quite a
subjective measure. What do you think would let us get a more quantifiable
argument in this direction?

> although having fallback to ascii if unicode isn't supported on a system
> would be nice (or having an option to use ascii, given who knows if the build
> is even running under any kind of locale really).

Auto-detecting whether the system supports unicode or not and then using the
according variant would not help here. sbuild is probably only run on Debian or
derivatives which handle unicode characters just fine for a long time, so the
result would probably be that the characters would always be used in the build
logs. But this would defeat the main purpose to *not* use unicode characters.
See the next paragraph.

> But without some way to control it, your patch is "wrong" because the unicode
> boxes are a useful feature to a lot of users.

Then please explain the use case to me.

I don't have a degree in art but this:

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Update chroot                                                                │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

looks close enough to my eyes to this:

+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Update chroot                                                                |
+------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

That I don't see the argument. Are we really talking about a solid line looking
better than a dashed line here?

On the other hand, there are actual arguments against it:

 - using unicode characters is not strictly required here (as it would be for a
   program handling international script)
 - the sbuild log might be used outside of Debian in a world where not yet
   everybody can process non-ASCII characters (this is the reason why we don't
   want to autodetect whether the system running sbuild can do unicode)
 - if one wants to search for the headers (with command line tools or in
   editors) then (at least with my keyboard) it is easier to search for
   "-------" than to type "──────────"
 - it is not the place of a program that just builds packages in a chroot to
   enforce unicode support on all the tools and users that handle its logs

> Just because you don't like unicode is no reason to just throw something
> away.

Agreed, if it was just because I don't like unicode then that would be no
reason to throw it away. But you might've missed the actual arguments *against*
using unicode characters in bug #665847. For your convenience I have listed
them again above.

cheers, josch
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: signature
URL: <http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/buildd-tools-devel/attachments/20151005/1eee3ba3/attachment.sig>