Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
I took the bug out of the CC list, as the maintainer has already fixed the
problem.
----- Original Message -----
From: Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk>
To: <102941@bugs.debian.org>; <debian-devel@lists.debian.org>
Sent: Thursday, July 05, 2001 8:28 AM
Subject: Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
> 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?
How does one package make any difference here? Odds are large that the
package they ask for will have a description in English, though (assuming
you speak Swedish) the description could be Japanese, or Russian or Spanish,
which is likely to be worse than your English.
If you don't speak English well, you're probably better off going with a
distribution that has been localized to your language rather than Debian.
> there are already some other packages using latin-1, koi8-r and
> unindentified japanese encoding in description.
Yes, and that's not good either.
> 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.
The Packages file should be in ASCII. UTF-8 will not become dominant for
many years now, and even then, it will still be useful to be able to read
the Packages file across 7-bit links on 1973 terminals sometimes. English
(at least Debian package level English, as opposed to fine typesetting)
doesn't need UTF-8.
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