On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 10:15 AM Adam Borowski <kilob...@angband.pl> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jan 20, 2023 at 03:57:17PM +0200, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 11:47:42AM +0000, Simon McVittie wrote:
> > If the PRC government *requires* a non-UTF-8 encoding for things sold to
> > them, we would be doing our users who want to sell a product containing
> > Debian to the PRC government a disservice by dropping support for it
> > altogether.
>
> It appears to me they require the character _set_ but not encoding: ie,
> that all glyphs can be displayed, they can be entered from keyboard, etc.
> The standard talks a lot about font support, etc.
Hi Adam,
You are correct indeed. Yes, they worry more about the correct
coverage of characters, especially those that were added in 2022
corresponding to the latest ISO/IEC 10646 standard.
That said, they do require the ability to open, edit, and convert
GB18030-encoded files, but that is at the iconv() / ICU / application
level, but, like you said, they are NOT enforcing the use of
zh_CN.GB18030 as system locale. (I now stand corrected.)
Incidentally, they have published three pre-recorded webinars thus
far, and I have reuploaded them to YouTube here for easier access for
the rest of the world:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gByuPXth7s&list=PLWCc17-QBkRjwhRfvCpxM8ez3b0qWO59a
I have yet to figure out how to add automatic Chinese subtitles and to
have it translated to English. Maybe some day. :-)
> > We don't have to ensure it works perfectly out of the box; just that
> > support is achievable with a reasonable amount of work.
>
> Our installer doesn't allow choosing such a locale, thus if indeed the
> encoding not character set is legally required, then we'd need to change
> so before the release.
>
> But I don't expect that to be the case -- a few years ago I played with
> Deepin and don't remember any weird encoding being used. It would be good
> to either check again, or ask one of their maintainers.
Indeed, and that is what friends on #debian-zh IRC channel are trying
to tell me, and I have personally confirmed that not only Deepin, but
also Red Flag, openKylix, Ubuntu Kylix all use zh_CN.UTF-8 as the
default system locale (see my one of the really long-winded response
in this thread for details. So you are indeed correct, and I stand
corrected too. Sorry for the false alarm! My mindset was still
living in 2002 when zh_CN.GB18030 was assumed to be a requirement by
the industry, but apparently all distros have switched over to
zh_CN.UTF-8 by default.
Debian does still support zh_CN.GB18030 with KDE, LXDE, LXQt,
Cinnamon, MATE, etc., but crashes with GNOME 43 and XFCE at the moment
(at least not on my system), but that's good enough to pass the most
basic GB18030 test. Just like you correctly observe, "zh_CN.GB18030
as system locale" is not legally required, and thus no need to change
the Debian installer or the locales package for that, so I wouldn't
worry about that for Debian 12.0. (If the winds do change, we could
hypothetically sneak in the change in, say, Debian 12.1. And the
myriad of Debian derivatives in China can easily make that change for
basic conformance too.
Cheers,
Anthony
