Re: non-ASCII characters in /etc/locales.alias ?
Hi,
At 16 Jan 2002 13:48:46 +0000,
Alastair McKinstry wrote:
> I've been looking at /etc/locales.alias and the possibility of
> auto-generating it from locale-gen; and noticed that it has non-ASCII
> characters in it: in particular in
>
> bokm?l no_NO.ISO-8859-1
> fran?ais 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. Should this be supported?
> Should /etc/locales.alias have a tag describing its encoding?
> (e.g. an emacs-type tag)
I agree your opinion. Since definition of non-ASCII characters are done
by locale, non-ASCII characters cannot be used before the user specifies
the locale. Before the user specifies the locale, >0x80 characters
are "undefined characters".
ISO-8859-1 is a local encoding, just like EUC-JP is local encoding for
Japanese. Especially, it cannot co-exist with multibyte encodings.
(If you edit /etc/locale.alias with multibyte-capable editor in
multibyte locales, the 8bit "undefined" characters will be probably
broken. I feel this difficulty of editing when I translated Debian
webpage templates with "slices". To avoid destroying the Debian web
files, I have to use non-locale-supporting and 8bit editors. However,
to edit Japanese, I have to use 8bit-clean and multibyte-clean editor.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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