Bug#235759: Apology to german users required in the release notes

[Thomas Bushnell BSG <tb@becket.net>]

Jens Nachtigall <nachtigall@web.de> writes:

> Can you give some pointers to this? If you follow the long bug report 
> [1], you'll see that there is agreement that the current ,," quoting is 
> by far the worst transliteration. 2 opinions stated that the 
> transliteration towards »« might be problematic [2] [3]. One of them 
> [2] because in Switzerland's German they use «» (reversed, as in 
> French) -- Denis <barbier@linuxfr.org> stated , that Swiss users 
> already live with »« on debian.org and Gnome [4]. The other opinion [3] 
> found so many refutations that you'll have to read the whole second 
> part of the bug report rather then having me pointing at all of these 
> refutations.

I don't think anyone has said that the commas thing is acceptible.
The person you are responding to didn't say it was.

And, I still ask, why did the upstream maintainer put this in libc,
since he is, after all, German?  I'm curious.

> Frankly, I am getting tired of discussing this issue. I can't understand 
> why you, gotom, are that stubborn and can't respect a decision taken by 
> the German translation team. You already stated at the very beginning 
> of this bug report, that you find it "not well inspected" [6]... To me 
> your reluctance rather seems like a personal/social quirk. It's a 
> pity :-( I am sorry that I have to say that, I don't intend to offend 
> you, but it is hard to overcome the impression that giving all the 
> reasons and time was useless from the very beginning.

I think it's easy to say that it needs to be fixed, but it doesn't
require an apology as if German isn't properly supported anymore.  The
use of UTF-8 completely avoids the problem; so German is in fact
supported, and supported correctly.

What would be very nice is a description of this fact in the release
notes, perhaps something like:

  "The XXX locale for German unfortunately uses a bad way of
  representing open quotation marks.  We have retained it this way in
  order to preserve compatibility with other Linux distributions, and
  we hope that in the future it will be fixed.  Meanwhile, the YYY
  locale can be used, which fully supports German with the correct
  quotation marks."


Thomas