[Gnumed-devel] character encoding (was Re: fixes to gmAbout)

[J Busser]

At 10:42 AM +0800 9/29/05, address@hidden wrote:
> Hmm, looks like one of our Teutonic friends has been using their crazy
> non-standard extensions to the Latin alphabet again. ;-)
>
> Put
> # -*-  coding: latin-1 -*-
> in the top line and Python should be happy.

re Non-ASCI etc

Pardon my uncertainty here, but I was wondering at what level (OS 
configuration, dependency configuration, GNUmed-proper configuration 
etc) encoding must be specified and in what situations.

Is this type of issue considered a configuration issue rather than a 
dependency?

Is it an issue that affects only program code and not data, and/or is 
it any problem if data is at one stage stored in the backend under 
one encoding scheme, and is later retrieved from a machine or its 
software that have been (re)configured to a different encoding scheme?

I noticed during installation with an Etch testing disk --- which I 
aborted/overwrote with Sarge... I was just making sure whether a 
problem originated from a corrupted image --- that (is it) kernel 
2.6x will offer support for UTF-8.

Will that solve any of the problems (recognizing that the answer 
might apply only to OS/distros that support UTF-8) or would it be 
co-dependent on the packages (wxPython, Python) also having to 
support UTF-8 which they may not do?