From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from tex.lwn.net ([70.33.254.29]:35076 "EHLO vena.lwn.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751767AbbILUGS (ORCPT ); Sat, 12 Sep 2015 16:06:18 -0400 Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2015 14:06:16 -0600 From: Jonathan Corbet Subject: Re: [Reproducible-builds] [PATCH 2/2] DocBook: Use a fixed encoding for output Message-ID: <20150912140616.672b5d5a@lwn.net> In-Reply-To: <878u8ceisu.fsf@alice.fifthhorseman.net> References: <1441147632.9215.42.camel@decadent.org.uk> <1441147759.9215.44.camel@decadent.org.uk> <20150911133059.77455c16@lwn.net> <878u8ceisu.fsf@alice.fifthhorseman.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: linux-kbuild-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: To: Daniel Kahn Gillmor Cc: Ben Hutchings , Randy Dunlap , linux-kbuild , =?UTF-8?B?SsOpcsOpbXk=?= Bobbio , linux-doc@vger.kernel.org, Michal Marek , reproducible-builds@lists.alioth.debian.org On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 17:40:33 -0400 Daniel Kahn Gillmor 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