Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Thu, Jul 05, 2001 at 05:31:13PM +0100, David Starner wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk>
>
>
> > 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
The same as one particular package (tty-client) makes any difference
(i.e., none)
> package they ask for will have a description in English, though (assuming
> you speak Swedish) the description could be Japanese, or Russian or Spanish,
well, in fact, I do not speak Swedish (though I do Russian)
> 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.
>
that's true, but do not forget which distribution is the best :-)
> > 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
Packages file should (at least) allow true maintainers' names there
(with diacritics). For example I resigned from diacritics in my name
just in order not to cause confusion
> many years now, and even then, it will still be useful to be able to read
it will not become dominant if people ignore it and say ASCII is enough
> the Packages file across 7-bit links on 1973 terminals sometimes. English
use konwert for that. It works well. (I _do_ sometimes use
terminals from 1985 or so, imagine :-))
Or, in the future, if glibc people get enlighten, iconv() that
is able to do transliteration.
> (at least Debian package level English, as opposed to fine typesetting)
> doesn't need UTF-8.
But there is not just English. There are names, too.
Packages file should include full information, if possible.
Whether to display it to the particular user, well, that's another
question and depends on his/her/its locale settings.
For further information, see recent fl^H^Hdiscussion
at debian-policy
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
| Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk |
-----------------------------------------------------------
Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus.
Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
Reply to: