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Re: Bug#228486: Apology to german users required in the release notes



Michael Stone <mstone@debian.org> writes:

> On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 12:35:58PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> >No apology is necessary, because of (1).
> 
> No apology is necessary because it's a ridiculous concept.

Are you just trying to make it as difficult as possible to solve the
problem?  If so, please stop helping.

English quotation marks have never looked good.  But the German ones,
with the most natural German locale, are now looking *worse than they
used to*.  It's one thing to say "it's not as good as it could be",
but when you insist that it's ok to *make things worse* on the grounds
that English is already sucky, you aren't going to win points.

Nor is this about winning points.  

I get the feeling that you wish those annoying furriners would go away
with their funny marks and quaint obscure languages.  But Debian has
already decided we are going to support non-English languages as well
as we can, and it is inappropriate for you to attempt to subvert that
for whatever reason.

It is certainly true that sarge will have a problem in this area.  It
doesn't require an apology because there is an alternative solution,
but it's a pretty good thing to be upset about if you are German.  

The German l10n team gets to decide how German localization happens,
not you, and not me.  It's sadly too late to get a fix into sarge (and
it's a shame that the Debian glibc maintainers acted like jerks about
it).  

> I hesitate to tell people to use UTF-8 because full multibyte compliance
> isn't guaranteed in sarge.

How about we publish your home phone number so that they can complain
to you directly?  "If you don't like the way German quotes work in
Debian, then call Michael Stone at XXX-XXX-XXXX."  If you're right
that this is a trivial issue which nobody will care about, you should
be happy with that solution, right?

Thomas



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