Re: [PATCH 00/53] Get rid of UTF-8 chars that can be mapped as ASCII

Mauro Carvalho Chehab
2021-05-10T12:06:33Z

Hi David,

Em Mon, 10 May 2021 11:54:02 +0100
David Woodhouse <dwmw2@infradead.org> escreveu:

> On Mon, 2021-05-10 at 12:26 +0200, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> > There are several UTF-8 characters at the Kernel's documentation.
> >
> > Several of them were due to the process of converting files from
> > DocBook, LaTeX, HTML and Markdown. They were probably introduced
> > by the conversion tools used on that time.
> >
> > Other UTF-8 characters were added along the time, but they're easily
> > replaceable by ASCII chars.
> >
> > As Linux developers are all around the globe, and not everybody has UTF-8
> > as their default charset, better to use UTF-8 only on cases where it is really
> > needed.
>
> No, that is absolutely the wrong approach.
>
> If someone has a local setup which makes bogus assumptions about text
> encodings, that is their own mistake.
>
> We don't do them any favours by trying to *hide* it in the common case
> so that they don't notice it for longer.
>
> There really isn't much excuse for such brokenness, this far into the
> 21st century.
>
> Even *before* UTF-8 came along in the final decade of the last
> millennium, it was important to know which character set a given piece
> of text was encoded in.
>
> In fact it was even *more* important back then, we couldn't just assume
> UTF-8 everywhere like we can in modern times.
>
> Git can already do things like CRLF conversion on checking files out to
> match local conventions; if you want to teach it to do character set
> conversions too then I suppose that might be useful to a few developers
> who've fallen through a time warp and still need it. But nobody's ever
> bothered before because it just isn't necessary these days.
>
> Please *don't* attempt to address this anachronistic and esoteric
> "requirement" by dragging the kernel source back in time by three
> decades.

No. The idea is not to go back three decades ago.

The goal is just to avoid use UTF-8 where it is not needed. See, the vast
majority of UTF-8 chars are kept:

- Non-ASCII Latin and Greek chars;
- Box drawings;
- arrows;
- most symbols.

There, it makes perfect sense to keep using UTF-8.

We should keep using UTF-8 on Kernel. This is something that it shouldn't
be changed.

---

This patch series is doing conversion only when using ASCII makes
more sense than using UTF-8.

See, a number of converted documents ended with weird characters
like ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE (U+FEFF) character. This specific
character doesn't do any good.

Others use NO-BREAK SPACE (U+A0) instead of 0x20. Harmless, until
someone tries to use grep[1].

[1] try to run:

$ git grep "CPU 0 has been" Documentation/RCU/

it will return nothing with current upstream.

But it will work fine after the series is applied:

$ git grep "CPU 0 has been" Documentation/RCU/
Documentation/RCU/Design/Data-Structures/Data-Structures.rst:| #. CPU 0 has been in dyntick-idle mode for quite some time. When it |
Documentation/RCU/Design/Data-Structures/Data-Structures.rst:| notices that CPU 0 has been in dyntick idle mode, which qualifies |

The main point on this series is to replace just the occurrences
where ASCII represents the symbol equally well, e. g. it is limited
for those chars:

- U+2010 ('‐'): HYPHEN
- U+00ad ('­'): SOFT HYPHEN
- U+2013 ('–'): EN DASH
- U+2014 ('—'): EM DASH

- U+2018 ('‘'): LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
- U+2019 ('’'): RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK
- U+00b4 ('´'): ACUTE ACCENT

- U+201c ('“'): LEFT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK
- U+201d ('”'): RIGHT DOUBLE QUOTATION MARK

- U+00d7 ('×'): MULTIPLICATION SIGN
- U+2212 ('−'): MINUS SIGN

- U+2217 ('∗'): ASTERISK OPERATOR
(this one used as a pointer reference like "*foo" on C code
example inside a document converted from LaTeX)

- U+00bb ('»'): RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK
(this one also used wrongly on an ABI file, meaning '>')

- U+00a0 (' '): NO-BREAK SPACE
- U+feff ('﻿'): ZERO WIDTH NO-BREAK SPACE

Using the above symbols will just trick tools like grep for no good
reason.

Thanks,
Mauro