Re: INSTALL nits

[Gavin Smith]

On Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 10:02:53PM -0500, Paul Eggert wrote:
> > It would make sense to use "INSTALL.ISO"
> > as INSTALL in packages.
> 
> In old-fashioned packages perhaps. Nowadays a lot of packages use UTF-8 in
> their source files anyway.
> 
> I understand the reluctance to go beyond ASCII. Long ago I dealt with
> displays that couldn't even handle all of ASCII. But nowadays it generally
> isn't worth worrying about this stuff. Pretty much every builder can deal
> with the UTF-8 characters in INSTALL.

I'm not quite sure whether "builder" here refers to a human being or a
computer.

I was concerned with the case of a person trying to read INSTALL in a
non-UTF-8 terminal.  This is possible with e.g. "LC_ALL=C xterm" or in
some MS-Windows terminal windows.  People may be on broken or old systems
for whatever reason and may be reading INSTALL on their way to a more
functional system, in order to install software that will fix it.  I
agree that it wouldn't matter for a software package that wasn't "system
software" that is installed after everything else on top of a
fully-functioning operating system.