Re: Multibyte encoding - what should a package provide?
On Thursday 2 September 1999, at 16 h 50, the keyboard of "Oliver Elphick"
<olly@lfix.co.uk> wrote:
> I have had a request for a postgresql package with multibyte support.
I assume you noticed the thread on debian-devel under the titles "Debian-JP
discussions; lets wrap this up" and "this all this xxx-jp nonsense (was: Re:
ITP: grep-ja)". This is almost exactly the same problem.
I remind you that the multibyte option has frequently a huge cost in size and
speed. In that case, two packages from the same source is a reasonable choice.
> In one sense, this is only an issue because of Anglo-Saxon parochialism.
Well, actually, we have three groups:
- English-speaking people, who are fine with US-ASCII,
- European-languages-speaking people, who are quite happy with 8bits ISO-8859-* and locales,
- Asian-languages-speaking people, who need Unicode (and therefore multibyte).
The second category has no longer any problem with Unix, almost all the programs are 8bits-clean now, sometimes with a bit of tinkering. The problem is with the third one. You are not Anglo-Saxon-centric if you refuse multibyte and Unicode. Just European-centric :-)
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