Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 09:11:47PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At Fri, 6 Jul 2001 11:16:09 +0200,
> Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk> wrote:
>
> > are you going to tell those maintainers to change their names? :-)
>
> Then, may I write my name in non-ASCII letters (Kanji in EUC-JP
> encoding) in Maintainer: field ? Please use ASCII transcription
sure, go ahead (as long as you use international encoding, i.e. UTF-8)
(of course, "good manners" say you should include transcription
of your name in latin script - not necessarily ASCII! - as well,
for the benefit of us kanji-challenged)
> (for example, ü -> u) for this purpose. Never use non-ASCII
> character here.
>
> It is ISO-8859-1-language-speaking people's bad habit to use
> ISO-8859-1 characters for files which may be read by foreign people.
Agreed. FYI, my language is _not_ ISO-8859-1.
>
>
> > yes, if all the languages used ASCII, it would be much easier,
> > but unfortunately, they do not.
>
> If all the languages used ISO-8859-1, it would be much easier,
> but unfortunately, they do not.
>
If all the languages used _any common encoding_, it would be much easier.
Hey, wait a minute, there is such an encoding already...
> However, fortunately, all popular encodings in the world share ASCII.
>
And even more fortunately, there is an emerging international standard
proposing solution to this situation, UTF-8
On Fri, Jul 06, 2001 at 09:21:05PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At Fri, 6 Jul 2001 11:58:05 +0200 (CEST),
> jcdubacq@info.unicaen.fr wrote:
>
> > They all use ISO-8859-1 (or ISO-8859-15, no difference). Well, they
> > won't change their names. So Debian must increase its support of UTF-8.
>
> Do you mean, they won't change Maintainer: field? I want them to change.
> Otherwise, all discussions about Description: field will be in vain.
>
I want them to change that too. But to UTF-8.
I do not want to force them to use only approximate forms of their names.
> ASCII is international (i.e., shared all around the world) but ISO-8859-1
ASCII is American, not international (American Standard Code ....)
It just happened that USA acquired world supremacy and is forcing
its standards to everyone else.
> is a local encoding for western-European languages, just like EUC-JP is
> a local encoding for Japanese language.
Agreed, therefore for information exchange in a global context (where
debian unquestionably is), we should be using an international
charset. Not American. Not western european. Not Japanese. Neither
of them is capable of acomodating all necessary characters.
>
> > Debian must strive for i18n support. Of course, you are aware of it :)
>
> Yes, but this problem is different from the problem I am discussing now.
>
But good i18n support will mean UTF-8 aware curses and slang, which in turn
means dselect can display packages' descriptions in UTF-8 without
any problems, which in turn means there would be no reason to limit
Packages file to ASCII, which in turn means we should mandate all
the non-ascii fields to change into UTF-8, which is part of what
we are discussing now. Whoa, what a sentence :-)
--
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| Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk |
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