On Sun, Oct 21, 2001 at 08:37:04PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote: > My idea is that xfonts-base will contain at least _one_ font from > every charset. This will minimize the increase of the size of > xfonts-base and at the same time we can keep the equality among > languages in the world. The current font encodings in xfonts-base aren't about equality, they're about backward-compatibility (and keeping the size of the package reasonable). Historically, the X Consortium -> the Open Group -> the XFree86 Project only made ISO-8859-1-encoded fonts available. It was the work of Markus Kuhn for XFree86 that greatly increased the repertoire of represented character sets in the fonts shipped by XFree86. As you can see from reading the Debian X FAQ, because of the historical availablity of BDF/PCF fonts with the X Window System itself only in ISO-8859-1, many toolkits and applications request these fonts with wildcards in the charset and encoding fields and expect to get ISO-8859-1 back. This is a poor assumption to make but that doesn't change the fact that a lot of people have made it. When code has been committed to XFree86 to permit on-the-fly font recoding, the ISO-8859-1 fonts will come out of xfonts-base, leaving only ISO-10646-1 for Western character sets. The -transcoded packages aren't about putting users of non-Latin-1 languages into a ghetto. If that were the case I wouldn't ship various JIS and GB fonts in xfonts-base (remember the days of "xfntbig" and "xfntcjk"?), and I certainly wouldn't ship the huge ISO-10646-1 fonts. I know it's popular, especially among some of the French Debian developers, to paint me as a monolingual racist[1] and/or a nationalist, but that simply isn't the case, as any review of the XFree86 package changelog will reveal. I just think it's rude, as does XFree86, to yank the rugs out from under the users of all these applications which were written with lazy and poor assumptions about the availabity of character sets on the system. If people have a problem with ISO-8859-1-centrism, I suggest they take it up with the people who made those assumptions, not XFree86, not my packages, and not me. [1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-french/2001/ debian-devel-french-200110/msg00015.html -- G. Branden Robinson | Q: How does a Unix guru have sex? Debian GNU/Linux | A: unzip;strip;touch;finger;mount; branden@debian.org | fsck;more;yes;fsck;fsck;fsck; http://people.debian.org/~branden/ | umount;sleep
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