Daniel Burrows <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Sunday 05 December 2004 03:32 pm, Jose Carlos Garcia Sogo wrote: >> > Would Peter permit me a mild dissent? I prefer Latin-1. Reason: I can >> > recognize and distinguish Latin-1 characters, even when I do not always >> > understand the words they spell. Recognizing and distinguishing the >> > characters is important to me. And not just to me. Imagine the dismay >> > of a Korean user trying to read Arabic script in a control file. >> >> But the only field in UTF8 should be Maintainer, and that field should >> have (IMHO) also a roman transliterate for the name, if you don't use a >> latin charset (Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese...) > > Well, when aptitude gets UTF8 support, it'll decode all the control fields > that are mainly meant for human consumption: that means at least Description > in addition to the Maintainer field, and maybe also Section.
I think the only field in UTF-8 in the main (english) Packages file should be the maintainer field. There might be some discussion about allowing the packages name in the description to be native too but I wouldn't like that. Now, for translated Packages files, like a chinese one, only the description should change. > I don't see any reason to limit ourselves in the long term by sticking to > Latin1 (or ASCII) just because none of us can read all of the languages that > are available in the extended UTF8 namespace. If we want people to stick to > certain subsets of UTF8, that should be determined in Policy, not the > packaging software. The software has to be able to work with translated Packages file. It would be quite unacceptable for aptitude to show gibberish in the description for a chinese user with a translated Packages file. So there realy should be no limit there. But limiting each Packages file to the subset of characters recognisable in that language sounds like a good idea. Chinese user probably don't want japanese in their Packages file and vice versa. Seeing that english is the common language in Debian I would also say that an english description is a must. > If you want a practical concern (aside from, say, a general suspicion of > building policy into software tools), consider these cases: > > -> Someone wants to translate the Description fields of all packages in > Debian into Chinese or Arabic. What will they do if the package tools only > support Latin-1? > > -> Someone wants to use the Debian packaging tools to create a new > distribution for use in China. Again, what will they do if the package tools > only support Latin-1? > > Daniel You are absolutely right, the tools should cope with everything with the possible exception of warning/rejecting policy violations on upload. MfG Goswin