It is one thing spiritedly to argue a point against friends and allies. It is another to be obstinate. I do not wish the latter, and I admit that I am both outnumbered and outreasoned today. Please permit me without malice to conform my position, which now might be stated as follows. Unicode is a reasonable solution to a difficult yet important problem. Broadly accepted even among Debian Developers from the Latin-1 countries, Unicode is also recognized outside Debian around a wider world. Unicode is recommended for general Debian application. For non-localized purposes in which a restricted, byte-based character set is wanted, plain seven-bit ASCII is normally the logical choice. As for Latin-1, although it served some needs in an earlier day, it must today be regarded as a local, incompatible encoding, not recommended for general international use. I trust that you will inform me if the conformed position yet lacks in any significant way! Besides expressing my own revised view, the statement also means to summarize the subthread's key points. Since I happen to have the attention of interested people at the moment, I should say that I could use some help in conforming debram's [7800 Non-English Natural Language] division sensibly to the Unicode consensus. I lack the right knowledge to do it myself. At present, only the Latin-1 languages are sensibly differentiated there. The aid of a Russian (for group 7890) and a Japanese (for group 7880) might be particularly suitable, for instance. (If you don't know what this is about, it regards debtags [1].) Turning to another matter, the responses to my impromptu roster of Debian development skills indicate that the roster has been taken in slightly a different manner than I had meant it. > ... the typical roster of skills one masters in > contributing broadly to Debian development is ... > awesome: C, C++, CPP, Make, Perl, Python, Autoconf, > CVS, Shell, Glibc, System calls, /proc, IPC, sockets, > Sed, Awk, Vi, Emacs, locales, Libdb, GnuPG, Readline, > Ncurses, TeX, Postscript, Groff, XML, assembly, Flex, > Bison, ORB, Lisp, Dpkg, PAM, Xlibs, Tk, GTK, SysVInit, > Debconf, ELF, etc.---not to mention the use of the > English language at a sophisticated technical level. Although the roster may be interesting, it was meant neither as a canonical proposal nor as a challenge. In fact it was just what I had happened to think of informally at the moment. For the record, I happen to have a working familiarity with nineteen of the items on my own roster, plus a limited familiarity with seven more. Were the roster a challenge, it would be a foolish one, because Steve Langasek would beat me in a Debian development contest and I know it. As for the other fifteen roster items, as Steve said, > "contributing broadly to Debian" usually means > mastering some of these skills, and knowing where to > find answers for the rest. -- Thaddeus H. Black 508 Nellie's Cave Road Blacksburg, Virginia 24060, USA +1 540 961 0920, t@b-tk.org 1. http://debtags.alioth.debian.org
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