[buildd-tools-devel] Bug#665847: Bug#665847: sbuild: Please add option to use plain ASCII characters in graphics

[Johannes Schauer]

Hi Jari and all,

On Mon, 26 Mar 2012 23:16:53 +0300 jaalto <jari.aalto at cante.net> wrote:
> On 2012-03-26 19:31, Roger Leigh wrote:
> | On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 06:32:38PM +0300, Jari Aalto wrote:
> | > The output of sbuild is difficult to handle because the graphical boxes it
> | > draws are not plain
> | > 
> | >     +-------------------------+
> | >     |                         |
> | >     | ASCII representation    |
> | >     |                         |
> | >     +-------------------------+
> | > 
> | > Please add option to choose the output format e.g. with
> | > 
> | >     --ascii
> | > 
> | > So that the content can be saved and copy/pasted as plain/text (US-ASCII
> | > encoded).
> | 
> | We can certainly look at doing this.  However, I would be interested
> | to know what difficulties you are experiencing, since this was not
> | mentioned in the report.
> | 
> | The box drawing characters are not particularly special--they are
> | just UTF-8, which is well supported on Debian for over a decade now.
> | If there are any tools which are not working with UTF-8, it would be
> | very helpful to know which they are.
> 
> Copying text from this output to other places (mail messages, personal
> book keeping files) etc.
> 
> Those destination may be text/plain US-ASCII and not UTF-8. 
> 
> I don't personally usually save or use UTF-8 unless it's absolutely
> necessary; would much more prefer plain ASCII for shell based output
> that can be the manipulated with standards tools. E.g. I'm not sure how
> awk(1) would handle matching text inside those UTF-8 boxes.

add to that, that even if awk, grep, vim and friends are capable of it, it's
probably way easier to type ====== on most keyboards than to type ════════ when
you want to search for the headings.

Your arguments together with those of Dima in bug #765886...

 | Sbuild likes to print out unicode characters, which improves the process
 | very little, but is extremely annoying when it fails (when running on a
 | non-unicode terminal, say).

 | Unicode is a very good thing WHERE IT IS REQUIRED. If I was using a tool
 | that dealt with Japanese text, say, then this tool would have a very
 | reasonable expectation to use unicode, and any attempts to remove that would
 | be clearly misguided.
 | Here we have a tool that builds packages in a chroot. There is no
 | reasonable expectation that unicode is required AT ALL. And this is
 | evidenced by sbuild working just fine, except in a minor aspect of its
 | reporting: the way it draws boxes

...and considering all counter arguments to instead have unicode by default...

 1. everything *should* know unicode in 2015
 2. unicode characters are more pretty

...let me conclude that it is slightly better to have ascii as the default as
the arguments for it outweigh the arguments for utf8 encoded unicode
characters.  I don't think it is sbuild's place to decide the technology that
is used to transmit and manipulate its default build logs.  Instead, they
should be understood by the widest range of technologies possible. The feature
of drawing boxes for a visual highlight is possible just with ASCII so there is
little reason to require more.  Especially because I see little to no
additional "prettyness" in the unicode boxes.

Thanks!

cheers, josch
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