Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 11:18:45AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Radovan Garabik wrote:
>
> > 2) Localized fields in debian/control, such as Description-fr etc.
> > This is a different issue than 1), and has not been much discussed.
> > Probably the same way as debconf follows could be adopted.
> > Notice that even in English, there is an occasional need for
> > diacritics.
>
> How is there a *need* for diacritics? Most of the English-speaking world has
Maintainer names. What is the discussion mostly about?
> > b) require using utf-8
> > advantages:
> > - ASCII is subset, so all tools will work on this (those that
> > do not are buggy and should be fixed)
>
> Euhh... It's true that ASCII is a subset of UTF-8. It does not follow that
> all tools will be able to work with UTF-8 successfully. Anything that needs
no, it does not, but debian packaging tools are able. With the exception of
ncurses and slang programs, but utf-8 support is getting there.
> If you want to see UTF-8 become a reality, I would suggest focusing on
> bringing these tools up to snuff rather than debating the question on
> debian-devel. Until someone has identified the issues with the existing tools
> and attempted to address those issues, this is all theoretical discussion.
I have tried UTF-8 console.
The most visible problems are ncurses (being addressed upstream),
stty (I have no idea what would this need), and libreadline (I saw an old
patch floating around, maybe I'll look into it sometime)
> That includes identifying issues for users whose default locale is a multibyte
> non-Unicode locale.
>
> > - peole over the world are not familiar with non-latin scripts.
> > It seems reasonable to require latin-script (not necessary ASCII)
> > version of names to be included alongside the original ones
> > See [1]
>
> Yes, it should be ASCII. ASCII is the common denominator that's present in
It should, but it could not. For translation effort not to look dumb,
there is a need for _proper_ maintainers names somewhere. I am trying
to put it into Packages. If you have other ideas, please tell.
> all character sets, and it's the only character set that we can guarantee will
> be portable across locale boundaries. There will be people using non-UTF8
> terminals, mail readers, etc., for years to come, and filling our archive with
> UTF8 text won't solve that problem. We should not be pushing Unicode at the
there are people using UPPERCASE only terminals and printers now.
(I am one of them!). It does not mean we should not fill our archive with
lowercase letters.
> expense of our users' ability to make use of the system.
On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 11:20:57AM -0500, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Radovan Garabik wrote:
>
> > > transliterations. Also, I want to be able to admin Debian from any terminal
> > > with ASCII support, and that includes possible running the Packages file
> > > through more (as dselect/ncurses may be broken, or worse, libc is broken.)
>
> > so? you run Packages through more. You see some garbage in some
> > maintainers' names, or in some descriptions. Do not tell me this is
> > a problem (and besides, there ALREADY ARE 8-bit characters in Packages,
> > so this does not count as argument against utf-8 in Packages)
>
> It does count as an argument against utf-8 in Packages, because it's not
you meant s/utf-8/8-bit characters/, didn't you?
> agreed that the 8-bit characters in Packages SHOULD be there.
>
And we should make a conclusion about this.
I guess you agree current situation is bad, and should be corrected.
The question is, which way to go: make Packages ASCII only, since ASCII is
an intersection of all used encodings, or make Packages UTF-8, since
UTF-8 is a union of all used encodings?
Do not take me wrong, I am well aware of your reasons for ASCII only
Packages, I just feel a bit more radical :-)
--
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| Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk |
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