Re: An addition to busybox

[Adam Di Carlo <adam@onshore.com>]

As I understand it, after the user selects her language, then we can
derive a buncha info about then, such as their charset, and then we
might need a unicode -> acm charset 'downsampling'.

I'm a little worried about this whole system, i.e., wondering how it
could fit on the rescue floppy.  I wonder if we could scale things
back a bit.  For instance, in bf-localization.sgml, you say:

  To my knowledge, message catalogs and keyboard maps depend not only
  on the language the user speaks, but the user's location (e.g.,
  fr_FR, fr_CA, fr_CH, etc).  Console fonts are a bit different: they
  usually depend on the taste of the user and nothing more.  As
  result, the following scheme looks reasonable for me:
  [...]
<example>
    French (fr)
        Francais (France) (fr_FR)
            ISO-8859-1
            UTF-8

I don't understand why we have to go thru this much bother!  Why not
just offer what we can offer, i.e., make sure we have a charset for
each locale so glyphs can be rendered, but not try to account for
every possible user preference.

For example, for Russian:
    Russian
        KOI8-R
        ISO-8859-5
        UTF-8

For boot-floppies, let's just pick one charset encoding and run with
it!

My worry is that trying to account for every user preference, we're
going to have an impossible, unwieldy system that won't even fit on
the root disk (we only have a 100k or so).

-- 
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>