Re: Apology to german users required in the release notes
At Tue, 31 Aug 2004 12:26:28 +0200,
Helge Kreutzmann wrote:
> The Debian Project apologies for the unfortunate german quoting on the
> command line interface. A solution is worked on, but unfortunately
> hasn't made it into Sarge. As a workaround, switching to a UTF-8 based
> locale will avoid the problem.
It's not good idea to enforce your opinion to the release
announcements because even some German guys do not think it's
acceptable currently.
Regards,
-- gotom
> Rational:
> The current quoting for german locales (german, swiss, austrian, ...)
> tries to mimic proper german quoting (if UTF-8 is not present) and
> fails miserably:
>
> Opening quotes: ,,
> Closing quotes: "
>
> The opening quotes use 2 characters, are visually clearly different
> from the closing quotes and users are confused because they read the
> opening quotes as "two commas" and not "opening quote". Consider
>
> helge@sixtyfor:/scratch/incoming/MO/jan02$ /bin/mv -iv bla ~
> ,,bla" -> ,,/home/helge/bla"
> ,,bla" entfernt
>
> Bugs have been filled on this issue quite a while back ([1], [2]). The
> entire list [3] has expressed that the this behaviour is highly
> undesirable. Essentially two solutions have been proposed, and
> intensivly discussed[4]:
>
> A) Using the same quotes as in english, i.e., ""
> B) Using inversed french quotes »«
>
> The vast majority (c.f. the thread starting at [4]) believes that either
> solution is much better than the current state. However, the
> glibc-maintainers expressed concernes about diverging from upstream
> and pointed out that the bugs where minor and (implicitly) should be
> fixed at some later stage.
>
> Hence the appology is needed, since -- given Debians history -- users of
> stable employing a german locale will experience the (unambiguously
> perceived as ugly) quotes for the years to come.
>
> The (almost) complete discussion is archived both in various threads
> on debian-l10n-german and in the bug reports [1] and [2].
>
> Please CC: me as I am not subscribed to debian-release.
>
> Greetings
>
> Helge
>
>
> [1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=228486
> [2} http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=235759
> [3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-german/2004/07/msg00172.html
> [4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-german/2004/07/msg00149.html
> --
> Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys. Helge.Kreutzmann@itp.uni-hannover.de
> gpg signed mail preferred gpg-key: finger kreutzm@zibal.itp.uni-hannover.de
> 64bit GNU powered http://www.itp.uni-hannover.de/~kreutzm
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