Re: support for multilingual Packages files?

[Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org>]

On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> At Thu, 5 Jul 2001 01:04:18 +0200 (CEST),
> Wouter Verhelst <wouter@debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > 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 seri*le lijn.
> 
> Never use non-ASCII character (I pointed the character with '*').

Yes, that's right, I'm sorry.

> It may confuse multibyte-enabled terminals and users may feel trouble
> using dselect.  Use ASCII transcription (for example, &uuml; -> 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.

No, it's a bad habit of mine to always forget that character is only
available in Latin-1 ;-)

> 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.)

Indeed. And surely, if there is support for this in the dpkg-format, we
won't need this anymore. Which is preferable.

-- 
wouter dot verhelst at advalvas in belgium

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