Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
Hi,
At Fri, 3 Aug 2001 11:56:42 +0200,
Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk> wrote:
> Well, your reasoning suggested that you do not care about multilingual
> people, because there are a minority (no offence intended, I know you
> did not meant it this way)
Ok, as you understand my will, multilingual people can use UTF-8.
Also, people who only use their mother tongue can use UTF-8 if
they want. It should be easily achieved only by setting LANG
variable to *.UTF-8 (for example, en_US.UTF-8 or zh_CN.UTF-8).
> I was not speaking about forcing users, I was talking about
> default encoding of Packages (I repeat myself: you cannot have
> proper Packages in any other commonly used encoding other than unicode)
However, you insisted that garbages by outputing UTF-8 stream on
other multibyte terminals are not significant problems. Imagine
a screen is scrolled accidentally. The dselect cursor to indicate
a name of package may indicate a wrong package. The contents at
the top line will be lost. Thus, leaving this situation is just
like forcing users to use UTF-8 locales.
>> http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/unicode-symbols.html ? Did I wrote
>> only about yen-sign problem?
> no, but almost all of the problems (sans CJK unification) has nothing
> to do with unicode, but with the need to support legacy encodings
We need to _migrate_ from local encodings to UTF-8, which mean that
Unicode has to supply enough compatibility to local encodings.
If all people in the world were use Debian, the problem would be
simple. However, we need to read and write mails in ISO-2022-JP,
exchange data for/from Windows/Macintosh, and so on.
> (Notice: I feel neutral about CJK unification - mostly because I
> do not use Han characters :-), but I really understand both sides)
"Both sides are reasonable" means that both sides have defects.
I think you now understand there exist people who need to use
non-UTF-8 locales, which is my aim of Unicode-related discussion now.
I feel the discussion is too diverged. Now I think you and I don't
disagree on the really important points. What I think is important
is:
1. UTF-8 is one of important encodings in the world and should be
supported by Debian.
2. However, developers must not force users to use UTF-8 locales.
Instead, Debian should continue supporting locales which Debian
supports now.
3. To acheve (1) and (2), developers have to design softwares so
that they work well on various locales which Debian supports.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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