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

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor <dkg@fifthhorseman.net>]

On Fri 2015-09-11 15:30:59 -0400, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> On Tue, 01 Sep 2015 23:49:19 +0100
> Ben Hutchings <ben@decadent.org.uk> wrote:
>
>> Currently the encoding of documents generated by DocBook depends on
>> the current locale.  Make the output reproducible independently of
>> the locale, by setting the encoding to UTF-8 (LC_CTYPE=C.UTF-8) by
>> preference, or ASCII (LC_CTYPE=C) as a fallback.
>
> I guess I have to ask, though: doesn't it seem that having the docs
> produced according to the current locale is the Right Thing to do?  Users
> have their locale set as it is for a reason, it seems like the production
> of textual documents should respect their choice.
>
> Am I missing something here?

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.

          --dkg