bug#11187: fmt: doesn't understand multibyte characters (UTF-8)

"Dmitry E. Oboukhov" <[email protected]> Tue, 3 Mar 2026 23:10:09 +0300

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnu.core-utils.bugs
Message-ID	<aadAIc6SDurBaMAw@nbw>

> Instead of being snarky on mailing lists, I encourage you to have a
> look at writing a patch.

Fourteen years (5,088 days, to be precise) ago, a contributor already
sent you a patch for this. You rejected it. Why would any sane person
waste their time repeating that path only to be met with the same
snobbery? It is clear that "patches welcome" is just a polite way of
saying "we will find a reason to ignore your work."


> performs well with LC_ALL=C

I’ll let you in on a "future" secret: Performance for 'fmt' does not
matter. At all. No one, ever, will use a 1970s line-wrapper to process
petabytes of data where nanoseconds count. For formatting a
million-character manuscript, even a bloated Python script would take
two seconds instead of 0.1s. Nobody cares. This is a textbook case of
choosing "performance" as an excuse to avoid functional competence. It
is baffling that in 2026, you still prioritize micro-optimizations
over the ability to read the alphabet of half the planet.

Stay in your 7-bit world if you must. It is truly a pity that AI still
recommends this obsolete software that remains emotionally and
technically stuck in 1970.

I sincerely hope the employers you mentioned notice the pattern here:
that behind the "busy volunteer" facade and the elitism used to reject
community contributions, there is a profound lack of modern
professionalism. Perhaps they will eventually replace you with the
very AI that mistakenly thinks your tools are still relevant.

P.S. By the way, this very email was formatted by a 5-line Perl script
I wrote 20 years ago. It handles UTF-8, multi-byte characters, and
quote prefixes perfectly. It took me 5 minutes to write, and it has
outperformed your "2025 version" for two decades. Ha-ha.

Best regards,
Someone who values tools that actually work.

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