Hi, I found two non-ASCII characters, which may be intended to be ISO-8859-1.
(xc/nls/locale.alias 666) bokm?l: nb_NO.ISO8859-1 (xc/nls/locale.alias 685) fran?ais: fr_FR.ISO8859-1 I think usage of non-ASCII characters here is invalid. (In future, we may or may not use UTF-8). I imagine these locale names are left unremoved because of compatibility for HPUX system. (because xc/nls/locale.alias file has the following line) (xc/nls/locale.alias 662) XCOMM The following locale names are used in HPUX 9.x I propose to remove these alias names. For people who really need compatibility to HPUX system (though I don't think there are any such people, because these locale names are aliases), some instructions how to add ISO-8859-1 locale names may be written in some documents. Reasons: 1. Usage of ISO-8859-1 encoding is legal only under ISO-8859-1 locales. Since all system files are locale-independent, only ASCII characters (i.e., valid characters in "C" locale) can be used. (In future it may or may not be UTF-8, if "C" locale would mean UTF-8). 2. Imagine when people want to use locale names. It is when people want to configure their locale environments. When people want to configure their locale environment, it is natural that their locale environment is not yet configured. Thus, there are nobody who want to use ISO-8859-1 locale names legally. 3. Even if we were really need to use non-ASCII characters in locale.alias, usage of ISO-8859-1 encoding should be avoided because it is local encoding for 15 European languages, just like TIS-620 is Thai local and KOI8-R is Russian local. Usage of local encoding here means "biased" to specific languages. (Of course, usage of multiple encodings in one file is illegal.) UTF-8 should be the only candidate for this purpose. Thus, commenting out these two locale alias names would be insufficient. 4. Especially, locale.alias should be a good example or copybook for other i18n-learning people. Usage of illegal characters should be thus strongly discouraged. 5. If such bad locale names are written in locale.alias, new users (not only people who _really_ need it for compatibility purpose and who know what they are doing) will use these names. It should not occur because it helps more and more people will have wrong idea on i18n. (The reason why this should be avoided is that this may help appearance of more and more i18n-novice developers.) 6. People can do without such ISO-8859-1 locale names because these locale names are aliases. Use the original names or other aliases and people will be happy. I am planning to propose similar thing for GNU libc's locale.alias file. --- Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ "Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/ _______________________________________________ I18n mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/i18n
