Re: Status of UTF-8 Debian changelogs
On Sat, 2003-06-07 at 13:43, Dmitry Borodaenko wrote:
> I don't see it as a proper credit to your contributors if their name
> appears as 'J?rg?n' (or even '????' in case of Kanji) on my display.
That's a problem with your display.
> What I objected to is that they may: I'd rather they may not. I'd rather
> encoding of changelogs was specified to be 7-bit ASCII.
I think that's just like giving up. It will make life more painful for
everyone.
> Excuse me for ad hominem, but how many foreign languages do you speak?
> The reason I'm asking is that my observation is that people from
> countries with completely non-ASCII writing system (as opposed to
> European Latin-based languages) almost always do transliterate their
> names when they communicate with someone speaking a different language.
Of course, this is likely because it wasn't until fairly recently (i.e.
the last year or two) that GNU/Linux got some basic support for their
writing systems. So they essentially had to transliterate. But now
with UTF-8 there's a better choice, and they can use their real name.
> The biggest compromise you can convince me to with that argument, is to
> allow to put non-ASCII names in UTF-8 into changelogs, but only if such
> name is accompanied by ASCII transliteration. But that solution is
> substantially more complex than just limiting changelogs to 7-bit ASCII,
> and there is no easy way to check for compliance.
That's something that an individual maintainer could decide to do.
Perhaps they could include a transliteration in quotation marks, like:
カゼチ "Junichrio Koizumi" <junichiro@example.com>.
My apologies if the above is some grave insult in Japanese; I just
picked some random Katakana in gucharmap :)
Anyways, I think transliteration is largely a separate issue from the
encoding of the changelog. Using UTF-8 doesn't force people to stop
transliterating.
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