Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 01:04:18AM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
...
> This would all be correct if only package managers and users would have to
> deal with packages. But that is not the case.
> - - There are porters that sometimes need to know what a package does to do
> their job right.
> - - We have archive maintainers (the people from ftp.d.o) that *do* need to
> know what a package does in order to do their job right. Not just
> occasionally.
> - - If you're running a shell-box that everyone can sign up to, you'd better
> know what software you're running. If you don't know swedish, but 75% of
> your users is from sweden and wants this particular piece of software,
> you can't really help them since you can't trust one of your users
> translating the description (this package might be a security horror
> without you knowing... and obviously, if you want to use it since
> there's no alternative, you won't tell the system administrator...).
well, what if you are a system administrator and do not understand English
well, and users ask you to install a package you know nothing about?
(and believe me, there are more such administrators than you'd think,
I personally know several such people, and I know some others who
do not understand what are many packages about regardless of language
the descriptions are in :-))
>
> It's nice to, for instance, do the following:
>
> Description: foo package
> This package is a foo package, only interesting for those who speak
> Dutch. The package is meant to do bar and foobar on a serial line.
> .
> A description in Dutch follows:
> .
> Dit pakket is een foo pakket, alleen interessant voor mensen die
> Nederlands spreken. De bedoeling is dat je er bar en foobar mee kunt doen
> op een seriële lijn.
yes, I agree. Though for me, one-line description in english
and the rest in national language would be enough (as the
tty-client already provided)
...
On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 09:26:32AM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> At Thu, 5 Jul 2001 01:04:18 +0200 (CEST),
> Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
...
> > op een seri*le lijn.
>
> Never use non-ASCII character (I pointed the character with '*').
> It may confuse multibyte-enabled terminals and users may feel trouble
> using dselect. Use ASCII transcription (for example, ü -> u, or,
> I write my name in ASCII characters while my true name must be written
> in Kanji) or UTF-8 (after waiting for iconv() implementation of
> Description-handling softwares). It is a bad habit for Latin-1-
> language-speaking people to assume their encoding is priviledged and
> universal.
>
there are already some other packages using latin-1, koi8-r and
unindentified japanese encoding in description.
I just tend to ignore the garbage on screen (I can switch to latin-1
and koi8-r console easily, but it is bothersome to _guess_ what
encoding should I use just to read those several words)
> However, I don't deny your whole idea. Translated description *after*
> English can be a makeshift until we have true translation mechanism
> for Description field. (But, again, never use non-ASCII characters.)
>
debian should be multilingual. That includes working utf-8 console,
and then we can declare that charset of Packages (and other debian files)
is utf-8. Of course, that is a work for more distant future.
And, take for example chinese. You cannot sensibly write it in ASCII.
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