Re: support for multilingual Packages files?

[Tomohiro KUBOTA <tkubota@riken.go.jp>]

Hi,

At Thu, 5 Jul 2001 01:04:18 +0200 (CEST),
Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:

> It's nice to, for instance, do the following:
> 
> Description: foo package
>  This package is a foo package, only interesting for those who speak
>  Dutch. The package is meant to do bar and foobar on a serial line.
>  .
>  A description in Dutch follows:
>  .
>  Dit pakket is een foo pakket, alleen interessant voor mensen die
>  Nederlands spreken. De bedoeling is dat je er bar en foobar mee kunt doen
>  op een seri*le lijn.

Never use non-ASCII character (I pointed the character with '*').
It may confuse multibyte-enabled terminals and users may feel trouble
using dselect.  Use ASCII transcription (for example, &uuml; -> u, or,
I write my name in ASCII characters while my true name must be written
in Kanji) or UTF-8 (after waiting for iconv() implementation of
Description-handling softwares).  It is a bad habit for Latin-1-
language-speaking people to assume their encoding is priviledged and
universal.

However, I don't deny your whole idea.  Translated description *after*
English can be a makeshift until we have true translation mechanism
for Description field.  (But, again, never use non-ASCII characters.)

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/