RE: support for multilingual Packages files?
> > The package description file could be in UTF-8 all the time
> (ASCII being a
> > very nice subset of that, so nothing breaks) and then
> records would be
> > localized (the same record would appear many times, tagged
> with locale
> > information). Then we would say "We require at least an
> English version of
> > each field" instead of saying "Use ASCII."
>
> Various encodings are used in the world, such as ISO-8859-*, EUC-*,
> ISO-2022-*, KOI8-*, and so on so on. English version of messages are
> used when translations are not available. Thus, English version has
> to be avaiable in any locales. Using non-ASCII character will limit
> dselect and so on to run only under UTF-8 locales, which is against
> (1) the current Debian situation that UTF-8 locales are not popular
> and (2) the future ideal Debian situation that should support not
> only UTF-8 locales but also all locales which the current Debian
> supports. Even though I guess UTF-8 would be the only popular
> encoding in the world in ten years, it does not mean that we can
> force users to use UTF-8 locales.
>
> ASCII is the common subset of all encodings which Debian supports
> and which are very popular in the world.
I never said that you'd have to force users to use UTF-8. You could *store*
the text in UTF-8 (which for your ASCII requirement for English would work
too), and then dselect would either display the ASCII (no change) or will
translate the UTF-8 back to the charset used by the user's locale, which can
be ISO 2022 or whatever. It's definitely not difficult to do.
YA
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