Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
From: Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk>
> Of course, there could be one translation, let's call it Packages-ascii
> (or Packages-en, name is not important, or even Packages and keep
> Packages-utf8 as the canonical source) and that is the 7-bit ASCII
> version, suitable for dselect. </braintorm>
I'd prefer Packages with Packages-utf8 as the canonical source. I'd have no
objections to that. Now, you have to get enough people to care enough to get
it done . . .
> All other problems could be fixed.
I've never found the Unicode people unresponsive to problems. Most
complaints, though, are about stuff that won't get fixed, because Unicode
doesn't work that way, or it would break backward compatibility -the Greek
sigma problems, the fact that they won't encode any more precomposed
characters or digraphs . . .
> FYI, when someone wants to search for my name with diacritics, he is
> equally likely to enter it with diacritics. I've seen it.
I doubt it. Maybe in your systems, but looking at the geographical
distribution of maintainers, more than half come from the US, Austrilia, and
Japan, meaning the diacritics probably aren't on their keyboard.
> That is my problem - I cannot communicate well with ASCII only.
> Not even with my ISO-8859-2 console I am (sort of) forced to use.
> It is not just my name - to hell with it. But the inability
> to mix languages freely when I need it drives me up the wall.
According to someone on slashdot (Alex Belitis(?)), you don't need to mix
languages. So what's the problem? (-;
But seriously, I understand your trouble. But I don't see where the Packages
files is a big part of it. Better UTF-8 handling in X, better console/*term
handling of UTF-8, better editor support for UTF-8, all of which would
probably be more useful than worrying about the Packages file.
--
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
"The pig -- belongs -- to _all_ mankind!" - Invader Zim
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