Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Wed, Jul 18, 2001 at 01:32:50AM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At Tue, 17 Jul 2001 09:35:36 +0200,
> Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk> wrote:
>
> > That was what I meant. The worst that happen is that you read it
> > omitting the diacritics. If the diacritics is not there, you are no
> > better on.
>
> Then you think it is worse to omit the diacritics than printing
> the character with '?', don't you?
Of course.
If you did not know about diacritics in my name, would you think
it is incorrect? I do not think so.
(this happened to me several times - it is embarrasing to meet someone
you communicate via e-mail with and mispronounce his name)
If a user sees '?' instead of letters, s/he knows the name is incorrect,
and when there is a need to know the real name, s/he knows what
to do (view it in utf8 console, or use yudit to see the Packages file,
or use konwert to convert it to the installed locale, if it is
compatible, or hexdump the char and look it up in unicode
reference chart)
>
> Though I did not think about such opinion, my idea can cover such
> need. Just write '?' instead of corresponding Latin character
> without diacritics in 'Maintainer:' field and write character
> with diacritics in 'Maintainer-utf8:' field. On the other hand,
> people who prefer ASCII transliteration to '?' can choose the
> ASCII transliteration.
Ok, this does not seem so bad. Of course, the choice between
'?' and some other ASCII char would be at the discretion of
the maintainer in question.
(though I would prefer to use Maintainer-name instead of Maintainer-utf8,
or Mainainer-rfc2822 instead of Maintainer - but this is a minor
nitpick)
>
> Even if you want your name displayed correctly for people all
> over the world, it is just impossible. In the world, there are
> encodings other than ISO-8859-* and UTF-8 which are widely
> used. You did agreed that we cannot abolish non-UTF-8 locales
> now, didn't you?
yes.
Those people who would be advantegous enough to switch to utf-8 locale
will see it correctly, other will not. This is not a perfect world.
> It means that we must use ASCII as the common
> encoding in the world.
>
must?
we had to use uppercase-letters only once, for the sake of
interoperability. But times have changed, more and more
computers started to use charset with lowercase letters too.
Development goes on.
> > But with diacritics, people knowing the script can read it. If the
> > diacritics is not there, nobody can.
>
> With '?' or garbage character, nobody can.
those with UTF-8 console can.
Without diacritics, _no matter what they do_, they won't see it properly
--
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| Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk |
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