Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
Hi,
At Wed, 11 Jul 2001 14:01:57 +0200,
Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk> wrote:
> It strikes me as a bit of over-complication.
> Moreover, non-ascii chars can appear elsewhere, not just in
> maintainer's name (e.g. in package description)
I think having two fields of Maintainer: and Maintainer-utf8: is
a good idea to force maintainers not to use non-ASCII characters
in Maintainer: field. In my general feeling from my experience
to internationalize some softwares with cooperating with upstream
developers, there are many developers who innocently think that
ISO-8859-1 is universal. I won't blame them, because it is natural
because almost of them have never thought about i18n because they
have never felt need to study about character code and encoding
because they have never felt inconvenience aournd encoding problem.
Or, if future lintian will give an error on not giving ASCII
transliteration in Radovan's idea [Maintainer: ASCII NAME (UTF8 NAME)],
I think it will be enough.
I stick to supplying ASCII text by humanity (not by automatic
transliteration like filterm) because no automatic transliteration
can be perfect. I can declare that perfect transliteration cannot
be implemented even in future because some Japanese words (person's
name) can read in several ways, for example, Kan or Suga (sirnames
written as U+83C5), Yukiko or Sachiko (female individual names,
written as U+5E78 U+5B50), and so on. (Japanese parents can also
freely name their children using arbitrary Ideographs (from limited
range) with arbtrary reading.)
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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