Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 03:06:40PM +0200, Michael Bramer wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 01:59:55PM +0200, Radovan Garabik wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 01:04:50PM +0200, Michael Bramer wrote:
> > > But you can translated 'names' the same way. Make a table with the
> > > corerct spelling and translated this too.
> >
> > And where do you want to keep the table with correct spellings?
> > My idea was to keep it in original Packages, in utf-8 encoding
>
> This is IMHO no problem.
>
> one 'Maintainer:' with only ascii and one optional 'Maintainer-utf'
> with utf-8 encoding.
I though more of something like
Maintainer: Full name in UTF-8 (latin-script version if needed) <e-mail>
But these are just little implementation details.
In fact, why to mandate the ASCII field? Latin-script (with diacritics
if necessary) is IMHO sufficient. Translators either keep it,
or if the diacritics is not available in their encoding, strip or
transcribe it. (ideally, they would keep it since the translation
would be in utf-8, but I guess it has to wait until utf-8 locales
are widespread)
>
> a lot of Packages don't need Maintainer-uft and the Maintainer-utf
> will be small.
>
> I don't see a problem. And a package frontend (like gnome-apt,
> dselect) can use it.
>
> a technical question:
> the utf-8 encoding can transform in other encodings without
> problems, right?
it depends on what you mean.
If the other encoding contains all the necessary characters, sure,
there are plenty of tools to do that. Of course, you cannot get cyrillic
or CJK into latin-1 and similar.
(there are some problems with round-trip compatibility for some CJK
encodings, perhaps someone more knowledgable can comment on it)
--
-----------------------------------------------------------
| 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: