Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Colin Walters]

On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 10:42 -0400, Jesse Keating wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-03-12 at 14:29 +0300, Dmitry Butskoy wrote:
> > Then consider any user in non-latin1 locale. For example, my locale is 
> > Russian. I have no "é" on my keyboard...
> > 
> > Well, I can use cut and paste, when I have a mouse and the text is 
> > already shown on my desktop.
> > But what I have to do, when use just the cmdline interface? IOW, without 
> > any GUI -- just the Linux console, or remote ssh session? How can I fill 
> > the "é" character then?
> 
> You use the compose key like most the world has been using for a long
> time.  

Another alternative (with different tradeoffs) is to use gucharmap.  My
workflow for entering Unicode characters is like this:

Alt-F2
gucha
RET
Ctrl-f
e with
RET
(click on letter)
Ctrl-c
Alt-F4
Ctrl-v

It looks long, but really it's quite fast to type once you get used to
it (the required click is a bug).

The advantages are that you don't need to know beforehand what the magic
compose sequences are, and you can search for an arbitrary Unicode
character, even ones with no corresponding compose sequence.  The
disadvantage is that it's slower than compose.