Re: charsets in debian/control
Daniel Burrows <dburrows@debian.org> writes:
> On Sunday 05 December 2004 03:32 pm, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote:
>> > Would Peter permit me a mild dissent? I prefer Latin-1. Reason: I can
>> > recognize and distinguish Latin-1 characters, even when I do not always
>> > understand the words they spell. Recognizing and distinguishing the
>> > characters is important to me. And not just to me. Imagine the dismay
>> > of a Korean user trying to read Arabic script in a control file.
>>
>> But the only field in UTF8 should be Maintainer, and that field should
>> have (IMHO) also a roman transliterate for the name, if you don't use a
>> latin charset (Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese...)
>
> Well, when aptitude gets UTF8 support, it'll decode all the control fields
> that are mainly meant for human consumption: that means at least Description
> in addition to the Maintainer field, and maybe also Section.
I think the only field in UTF-8 in the main (english) Packages file
should be the maintainer field. There might be some discussion about
allowing the packages name in the description to be native too but I
wouldn't like that.
Now, for translated Packages files, like a chinese one, only the
description should change.
> I don't see any reason to limit ourselves in the long term by sticking to
> Latin1 (or ASCII) just because none of us can read all of the languages that
> are available in the extended UTF8 namespace. If we want people to stick to
> certain subsets of UTF8, that should be determined in Policy, not the
> packaging software.
The software has to be able to work with translated Packages file. It
would be quite unacceptable for aptitude to show gibberish in the
description for a chinese user with a translated Packages file. So
there realy should be no limit there.
But limiting each Packages file to the subset of characters
recognisable in that language sounds like a good idea. Chinese user
probably don't want japanese in their Packages file and vice versa.
Seeing that english is the common language in Debian I would also say
that an english description is a must.
> If you want a practical concern (aside from, say, a general suspicion of
> building policy into software tools), consider these cases:
>
> -> Someone wants to translate the Description fields of all packages in
> Debian into Chinese or Arabic. What will they do if the package tools only
> support Latin-1?
>
> -> Someone wants to use the Debian packaging tools to create a new
> distribution for use in China. Again, what will they do if the package tools
> only support Latin-1?
>
> Daniel
You are absolutely right, the tools should cope with everything with
the possible exception of warning/rejecting policy violations on
upload.
MfG
Goswin
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