Re: Re^2: Debian 2.0 release requirements (8bits)
On Fri, Jan 09, 1998 at 08:11:10PM -0500, Alex Yukhimets wrote:
> Aren't you questioning my right to do that? :)
> > AY> While this can be of importance to some users, it can be quite
> > AY> annoying to others.
> > ??? Please remember, a lot of languages need 8 bit clean programs. Non 8
> > bit clean programs are very bad.
> True. Many users need support for the language other than English.
> Some of that users need 8-bit clean programs AND still some additional
> customization. Some languages even have many optionas as to customization.
> (Take Russian - several possible encodings AND keyboard layouts).
> For some languages it is even not enough to have 8-bit clean programs.
That's correct - but that's what Unicode is for. It should
be supported whenever it seems feasible (e.g. web browsers).
But talking about Unicode is not going to do any good until
the world is 8-bit clean (and preferably all programs understand
Latin-1, as Unicode can fall back to that IIRC).
> You can't satisfy all users anyway. In addition, I would hate to be
> able to switch to "russian" keyboard mode (by mistake) and enter some
> letters which look just like English ones in the editor I use for
> _programming_.
Oh come on. I'd hate to change to dvorak mode. Accidental
switching of keyboard maps is hardly a good argument.
I mean, loadkeys /usr/share/keytables/slovene.map.gz
- do you really type that by accident?
(Then again, if there is a program to switch keytables
and it's user interface does not have a usable undo
or testing mode, the program is broken)
> > AY> What it means is saying "good-bye" to clean
> > AY> ascii e-mail, etc.
> > ???
> Yes. I don't like when I see 8-bit charachters. In my
> "non-internationalized" configuration they look like "<F23>"
> highlighted (or something like that). So?
> (PLEASE, no flames for *this* - I also don't like very much PGP
> signatures as MIME attachements)
I will flame you. You will not see 8-bit chars unless
you read mail from someone who writes those. For example
my parents live on Väinöläntie. How's that for you?
No, 8-bits aren't bad in themselves - if you don't want
to see them, avoid using them and they won't show up anywhere.
But don't deny others the possibility. If a mail message
does not contain any 8-bit chars, it will be sent as 7bit.
This is what you want and what will happen. But if it does
contain 8-bits then it's sent as 8-bit (or, in this world
of stupid software, 7-bit Quoted-Unreadable, but that's another
story..)
It's a win-win scenario. If you don't use you don't use them.
> > AY> What is more important, *some* utilities,
> > AY> "less" most notably, *shouldn't* be 8-bit clean.
> > Why? I would like to see German Umlaute.
> Sure, but I would like to be able to do "less <binary file>" safely.
> ("more" is not safe for this).
Aww fsck. Tell less to grok ISO Latin-1 and it will
- you know, there is a single function to check if the
character is displayable or not. If it isn't it will
be displayed as a hex code. Again, win-win.
> Finally, the only thing I am trying to tell is that it is probaly not
> very wise to put as a requirement for *every* package to be 8-bit
> clean. (Note my point with the editor used for programming). I would
> suggest to use individual approach and have options for the user
Every package should be 8-bit clean. If I type 8-bits
anywhere I expect the program not to strip the eight bit.
Just plain old Latin-1 is not *that* difficult (Unicode,
then again, is). You still have not demonstrated any single
case where that would be harmful.
PS. Background: I live in Finland. We have äöå and a bit
weird keyboard layout. On debian(&redhat) just about
everything works exactly as it should. It wasn't that
hard, was it? It didn't break anything (or did it?)
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