Re: support for multilingual Packages files?
On Mon, 30 Jul 2001, Niklas Hoglund wrote:
> > I concede that it's useful to be able to represent Maintainer names
> > in full Unicode; that is not in question. What I disagree with is
> > the argument that such non-ASCII characters should be included in
> > existing fields of the Package file.
> > If all Unicode is limited to new fields that we introduce into
> > Packages, there's a very simple mechanism that we can use to provide
> > backwards compatibility with even the most rudimentary of ASCII-only
> > tools:
> > $ grep -vE '^(Description.+|Maintainer-utf8):' < Packages > Packages-ascii
> This might fail on UTF-8. The ASCII code for newline may be part of a
> multibyte character (I think), so part of a description may be left.
It may not. UTF-8 is completely backwards-compatible with ASCII and
ISO-8859-x in that all single-byte characters that are used as control
sequences in these encodings are also reserved in UTF-8.
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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