Re: support for multilingual Packages files?

["David Starner" <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org>]

> I never said that you'd have to force users to use UTF-8. You could
*store*
> the text in UTF-8 (which for your ASCII requirement for English would work
> too), and then dselect would either display the ASCII (no change) or will
> translate the UTF-8 back to the charset used by the user's locale, which
can
> be ISO 2022 or whatever. It's definitely not difficult to do.

You miss the point. Part of the argument is that the English one should be
in UTF-8, since many maintainer's names aren't in ASCII. Transliterating
from full UTF-8 to any other character set correctly is impossible, due to
lack of context, variable user expectations, and context sensitive
transliterations. Also, I want to be able to admin Debian from any terminal
with ASCII support, and that includes possible running the Packages file
through more (as dselect/ncurses may be broken, or worse, libc is broken.)

--
David Starner - dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org
"The pig -- belongs -- to _all_ mankind!" - Invader Zim