Re: [Reproducible-builds] [PATCH 2/2] DocBook: Use a fixed encoding for output

[Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>]

On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 17:40:33 -0400
Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net> wrote:

> I sympathize with Jonathan's general concern here -- if this patchset
> makes it impossible for people to build documentation with (for example)
> their preferred collation order, it would be suboptimal.
> 
> On the other hand, this seems to focus on character encodings
> specifically; do we really want to encourage any sort of encodings other
> than UTF-8?  The only plausible arguments i've heard for documents that
> are exclusively CJK characters, which could achieve a modest size
> reduction using more targeted encodings.  afaik, there are no such
> documents in the kernel, and i doubt there ever will be.

Well, there are CJK documents in the kernel, actually, though none are in
the DocBook directory currently.

Regardless of this, it's not a matter of which encodings we are
encouraging.  If we want to encourage utf-8 use, we might not want to
start in the kernel's documentation directory.  I think we need to
respect the user's choice in this regard and not try to override it.  If
I take this patch, I suspect somebody will yell at me for it...

With regard to reproducible builds: success in this area certainly
requires reproducing the build environment as well.  Honestly, I think
that needs to include the locale settings.

Let me know if you think I've totally misunderstood things.

jon