Rack encodings (was: Please move to github)

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

(Long overdue Subject: change)

Hongli Lai <hongli@phusion.nl> wrote:
> Hi guys. Phusion Passenger author here. I would very much support
> standardization of encoding issues.

> At this point, I don't really care what the standard is, as long as
> it's a sane standard that everybody can follow.

Fair enough.  Would you/Phusion be comfortable taking the lead here?
This feels like another "hot potato" issue :>

> In my opinion, following Encoding.default_external is not helpful.
> Most users have absolutely no idea how to configure
> Encoding.default_external, or even know that it exists. I've also
> never, ever seen anybody who does *not* want default_external to be
> UTF-8. If it's not set to UTF-8, then it's always by accident (e.g.
> the user not knowing that it depends on LC_CTYPE, that LC_CTYPE is set
> differently in the shell than from an init script, or even what
> LC_CTYPE is).

Perhaps we need to educate users to set LC_CTYPE/LC_ALL/LANG so
Encoding.default_external works as intended?  Adding another
option to Rack will just as likely to get missed.

Maybe servers could emit a big warning saying:

    WARNING: Encoding.default_external is not UTF-8 ...

And add a --quiet-utf8-warning option for the few folks who really do
not want UTF-8.