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[Python-Dev] please consider changing --enable-unicode default to ucs4

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Tue Sep 29 04:18:25 CEST 2009 
James Y Knight wrote:
> On Sep 28, 2009, at 4:25 AM, M.-A. Lemburg wrote:
>> Distributions should really not be put in charge of upstream
>> coding design decisions.
> 
> I don't think you can blame distros for this one....
> 
> From PEP 0261:
>     It is also proposed that one day --enable-unicode will just
>     default to the width of your platforms wchar_t.
> 
> On linux, wchar_t is 4 bytes.
> 
> If there's a consensus amongst python upstream that all the distros
> should be shipping Python with UCS2 unicode strings, you should reach
> out to them and say this, in a rather more clear fashion. Currently,
> most signs point towards UCS4 builds as being the better option.

There is no such consensus. Linux distributions really should build
Python in UCS-4 mode, and I would be in favor of making it the default
to match wchar_t.

Regards,
Martin
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