[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: Bug#160284: ITP: po-debconf -- Manage translated Debconf templates files with gettext



Hi,

At Wed, 11 Sep 2002 05:06:00 -0400,
Glenn Maynard wrote:

> If the program converting .po files to template files always uses iconv
> to convert the .po file's encoding to UTF-8, and debconf always uses iconv
> to convert from UTF-8 to the locale encoding for display, shouldn't there
> be no problems?
> 
> Junichi said that "UTF-8 is not a one-to-one match with EUC-JP.", and I'm
> not sure what he meant.

I think there are no problem, when thinking about round-trip compatibility,
if we declare to use one particular mapping table --- glibc's one.
(XFree86 has its own set of tables but it tries to be same to glibc's.)

However, I have one concern.  Debconf is one of softwares which is
used in early stage of Debian installation.  Thus, Debconf should
not depend on many/large packages/data.

Encoding conversion is a relatively heavy process.  I mean, collection
of conversion tables is large.

I don't know if iconv (I can use "libtext-iconv-perl" package) or
encoding conversion in gettext work well without "locales" package
or not.  Do you have any idea?

If it *needs*, it means that Debconf cannot use encoding conversion
in small systems or early stage of installation.  Even in such cases,
Debconf should work fairly good in popular locales (like ISO-8859-15
for French and EUC-JP for Japanese).

If it *doesn't need*, we can freely design new Debconf to use iconv
or gettext.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/



Reply to: