Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Mon, Jul 30, 2001 at 11:48:53PM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> Hi,
>
> At Mon, 30 Jul 2001 13:59:55 +0200,
> Radovan Garabik <garabik@melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk> wrote:
>
> > Problems should be made visible and discussed, and solutions
> > should be find, instead of just telling "unicode is bad, we are never
> > going to accept it" (no, I am not talking about you, Tomohiro, I know you are
> > reasonable, but I know several people with this attitude)
> > IMHO there is no other (better) alternative for global encoding than unicode,
> > and unicode is not _that_ bad, and is already getting strong position
> > elsewhere.
>
> You are too optimistic. Every time I send a mail to Unicode Consortium,
> I am getting more and more pessimistic about the future of Unicode.
but, unless there is something better designed, there is no viable alternative
And unicode is being pushed hard from everywhere, nobody is going to design
anything better in a forseeable future.
> I feel the Unicode Consortium is a place for political dispute between
> major vendors and they cannot supply a usable CJK support. (I know
Are there any big outstanding problems apart from CJK unification?
> some members are struggling for users' interest. However, I don't
> know Unicode Consortium can think for users.)
in a group of N people, where N>=3, there are always some people
who are persuaded only their way is correct and do not listen
to others.
>
> Don't think about a future when all users will use UTF-8. Think
> about a future that UTF-8 is used as one of many encodings which
> Debian supports.
but national encodings are just that, national encodings. I cannot count
now many times I have been frustrated by this, when I needed to mix more
languages. UTF-8 helped a lot, at least on www pages I can use it freely
(apart from some support for old www browsers, but that is rather easy
achievable when I can expect who is accessing my pages)
I'd really wish I would not have to be limited by one national encoding,
on console, in my mails (utf-8 helps here, too), in text files.
> > (oh, well, and occasional diacritics in english words like rôle and résumé,
> > and I think it is reasonable leaving this up to maintainer's common sense -
> > to decide if he prefers "correct" usage no matter what or leaves diacritics
> > out and saves people without utf-8 console some headache)
>
> I don't think we can hope such a "common sense". In almost cases,
> maintainers use non-ASCII characters because they are innocent
> that foreign people cannot read the characters.
Because nobody told them. Education is never a bad thing :-)
>
> > or they could decide if they prefer not to include the ASCII version at all,
> > so that nobody is confused by incorrect variant of their name (I am talking
> > now about latin-script names with diacritics)
>
> It is YOU who want to avoid confusion of characters with and without
> diacritics. Why can you say that all people with Latin-script names
> want to use question mark than eliminating diacritics?
Not all. That would be up to the maintainers to decide what do
they want to do with their names.
>
> And please note, though Japanese people (I cannot say about other
> people) know 26 alphabets very well, they don't know about how many
> types of diacritics for Latin scripts. Such diacritics are less
> popular than Greek characters.
And? Do you know how to read Slovak letter "ch" ?
It consists of two pure-ASCII characters, no diacritics.
Should I transcribe names containing this letter for the benefit of
people not knowing how to read it? Of course not (and moreover, FYI,
that phoneme does not exist in English, nor in Japanese)
So it does not matter if they can read the diacritics correctly - it is
different for different languages, anyway. But they see the basic
letter, and the situation is no worse than not having diacritics there
at all.
(for example, I know Russian. I am not familiar with other versions of
cyrillic - only a bit with Serbian. Ukrainian and Belorussian use some
different letters, including diacritics. Yet, when I see Ukrainian or
Belorussian (names or text, whatever), I prefer to see it with
diacritics and with original letters, NOT transcribed into Russian
cyrillic)
--
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| Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ |
| __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk |
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