On Sun, Dec 05, 2004 at 04:42:24PM -0500, Daniel Burrows wrote: > On Sunday 05 December 2004 03:32 pm, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote: > > > Would Peter permit me a mild dissent? I prefer Latin-1. Reason: I can > > > recognize and distinguish Latin-1 characters, even when I do not always > > > understand the words they spell. Recognizing and distinguishing the > > > characters is important to me. And not just to me. Imagine the dismay > > > of a Korean user trying to read Arabic script in a control file. > > But the only field in UTF8 should be Maintainer, and that field should > > have (IMHO) also a roman transliterate for the name, if you don't use a > > latin charset (Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese...) > Well, when aptitude gets UTF8 support, it'll decode all the control fields > that are mainly meant for human consumption: that means at least Description > in addition to the Maintainer field, and maybe also Section. > I don't see any reason to limit ourselves in the long term by sticking to > Latin1 (or ASCII) just because none of us can read all of the languages that > are available in the extended UTF8 namespace. If we want people to stick to > certain subsets of UTF8, that should be determined in Policy, not the > packaging software. > If you want a practical concern (aside from, say, a general suspicion of > building policy into software tools), consider these cases: > -> Someone wants to translate the Description fields of all packages in > Debian into Chinese or Arabic. What will they do if the package tools only > support Latin-1? > -> Someone wants to use the Debian packaging tools to create a new > distribution for use in China. Again, what will they do if the package tools > only support Latin-1? Isn't there a proposal around for Description#en: <English text> Description#ja: <Japanese text> etc? I can see that this would have to be split somehow to avoid the Packages file suddenly filling CD1 on its own, but... -- Paul "TBBle" Hampson, Paul.Hampson@Anu.edu.au 7th year CompSci/Asian Studies student, ANU Shorter .sig for a more eco-friendly paperless office.
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