RE: support for multilingual Packages files?
Hi,
At Fri, 27 Jul 2001 16:13:16 -0700,
Yves Arrouye <yves@realnames.com> wrote:
> I missed some of the discussion, but isn't there some difference between
> selecting an encoding and having many languages (what multilingual means)?
>
> The package description file could be in UTF-8 all the time (ASCII being a
> very nice subset of that, so nothing breaks) and then records would be
> localized (the same record would appear many times, tagged with locale
> information). Then we would say "We require at least an English version of
> each field" instead of saying "Use ASCII."
Various encodings are used in the world, such as ISO-8859-*, EUC-*,
ISO-2022-*, KOI8-*, and so on so on. English version of messages are
used when translations are not available. Thus, English version has
to be avaiable in any locales. Using non-ASCII character will limit
dselect and so on to run only under UTF-8 locales, which is against
(1) the current Debian situation that UTF-8 locales are not popular
and (2) the future ideal Debian situation that should support not
only UTF-8 locales but also all locales which the current Debian
supports. Even though I guess UTF-8 would be the only popular
encoding in the world in ten years, it does not mean that we can
force users to use UTF-8 locales.
ASCII is the common subset of all encodings which Debian supports
and which are very popular in the world.
---
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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