Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Fri, 6 Jul 2001, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> I'd like to state a few premise.
> 1. An ideal system would be aware of LC_CTYPE locale category and
> support almost popular encodings (ISO-8859-*, KOI8-R, KOI8-U,
> EUC-JP, CN-GB, EUC-KR, Big5, TIS-620, TCVN, and so on).
> 2. Today UTF-8 support on Linux is very poor and it would maybe need
> more than a few years. (For example, Linux console's Unicode
> support [by unicode_start] is too poor to display CJK Ideogram).
> > sure, go ahead (as long as you use international encoding, i.e. UTF-8)
> > (of course, "good manners" say you should include transcription
> > of your name in latin script - not necessarily ASCII! - as well,
> > for the benefit of us kanji-challenged)
> No. Someone may want to use dselect under LANG=de_DE.ISO-8859-1,
> LANG=th_TH.TIS620, or LANG=ru_RU.KOI8-R locales. Then it will
> fail to display my name. It is just like I use dselect under
> LANG=ja_JP.eucJP and it fails to display ISO-8859-1 letters.
I think it would be nice to have support for full Unicode for maintainer
names (my own last name properly falls into ISO-8859-2), but I think this
should be done *in addition to* the regular Maintainer: field; e.g., we could
have an optional Maintainer-utf8: field which allows for Unicode
representations, but most tools would use only the Maintainer: field by
default.
Tools that want to use the extended Maintainer info when LC_CTYPE != UTF-8 are
free to make use of charset conversion libraries as well. As this is a
forward-looking solution, I think support for only ASCII and UTF8 should be
sufficient; I'm confident that in the long-term, UTF8 will be able to meet the
needs of CJK speakers, even if there are still some issues to be resolved
today.
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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