Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Fri, 13 Jul 2001, Radovan Garabik wrote:
> > If you write "your role involves a facade of
> > naive cooperation", everyone will know exactly what you mean, and very few
> > would give it a second look.
> of course, if you write "vasa uloha zahrna fasadu naivnej kooperacie",
> in Slovak, everyone will know exactly what you mean. That
> does not make the sentence correct, without all those required diacritics.
Which is not germane to this discussion, because diacritical marks in Slovak
are used to distinguish between different letters of the alphabet, and are
therefore integral to proper orthography in that language. In International
English, facade is an accepted spelling of façade, and most Americans never
learn the word with the 'correct' French orthography: for most Americans (this
is not an invitation to dump on American language skills), it is the second
spelling which will cause confusion.
> > modern international computer English is,
> > and that is writen in the ASCII character set.
> because of lack of other options...
> btw when I see facade without cedilla in an English text, my brain
> halts on it, tries to pronounce it with [k], only then recovers and goes
> on... (but I am no a native speaker, so this is not really relevant)
> anyway, this is irrelevant to the discussion... even if you claim the
> default language of Packages ASCII-only English, there are still cases
> when it is convenient to include a diacritics (or other chars) in the
> file.
Convenient for you, maybe, but not convenient for our users who are stuck
using real-world tools. Our users should come first.
When we're able to provide users with tools that can handle UTF-8 effectively
at every turn, *then* we can discuss full-Unicode in the packages file. But
*today*, we're not ready for that. We should therefore focus on getting the
software working, first.
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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