Re: non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias ?
On Wed, 2002-01-16 at 14:54, David Starner wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 16, 2002 at 01:48:46PM +0000, Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> > bokmål no_NO.ISO-8859-1
> > français fr_FR.ISO-8859-1
> >
> > I think using non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias is dodgy; it
> > would break in non- ISO-8859-1 environments.
>
> Break how? They will be display weirdly in other single byte encodings
> and not be usable in multi-byte encodings. But they shouldn't _break_
> anything.
>
See Wishlist Bug #86761
The point is to offer only aliases for locales that are present
(via locale -a) and aliases for all locales present (see Bug #8615).
locales.alias (and locale -a) could then be used wherever a list of
locale options are presented; eg. in gdm, rather than give a list of
languages, for which support may or may not be present,
locale-gen and localepurge and 'locale -a' could conspire to present the
user a list of languages for which there is support, only.
However, if that language list comes from locales.alias, then it
(or its display) will be broken.
At the least, 'locale -a' gives the user a list of locales they can
use, some of which can't be sensibly displayed or might mojibake the
display in the wrong multibyte locale.
> > Should /etc/locales.alias have a tag describing its encoding?
>
> Huh? How would that work? What's going to use it? What breaks
> when you add something in a different charset in there? (Sure it
> won't be usuable from ISO-8859-1; it will work fine from that
> charset, though.)
>
Placing a tag in comments that, for example, emacs could use to detect
the locale. This would be of the form:
# -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-
or
# Local Variables:
# encoding: utf-8
# End:
(need to check the exact syntax). This would be backward compatible, and
could be read by any other application that read /etc/locale.alias
(does vi/vim read such tags these days too?)
> IMO, the whole /etc/locale.alias is a bag on the side of the locale
> system; I don't see why these aliases make it any worse.
>
> --
> David Starner - starner@okstate.edu, dvdeug/jabber.com (Jabber)
> Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org
> When the aliens come, when the deathrays hum, when the bombers bomb,
> we'll still be freakin' friends. - "Freakin' Friends"
>
>
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>
--
Alastair McKinstry, Silicon Design Group, 3Com.
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