Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote on 2001-02-05 13:14 UTC:
> However, community-based distributions like Debian and FreeBSD cannot
> take this approach, because they can not and should not release
> "Japanese version". I said in the previous mail that Debian's aim is
> a single distribution for all over the world, where all what users
> have to do is to set LANG variable properly.
OK, let me expand the phrase "this is easily implemented" in my last
reply slightly, just to ensure you that we have exactly the same
high-level vision and that I am as well definitely not interested in any
need for localized special versions of Linux.
X11 has already a mechanism called font sets, that allows to assign
specific fonts to generic fonts requested by applications based on the
user's current locale. If this is set up properly (which has not yet
happened in XFree86 4.0.2), users which have set LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 will
get a slightly different default wide font with xterm, emacs, etc. from
users that have set LANG=cn_TW.UTF-8. The hard disk content will remain
the same all over the world, except for the line
export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8
in /etc/profile, that is set to a sensible default value after
interactive consultation with the installer during the installation
time, just like it is done with the time zone, the keyboard, etc. Users
have one single central tuning parameter to set their language
preference, and this can easily be utilized with existing mechanisms to
also affect the choice of default fonts. No reason to panic.
[An alternative way of setting the CJK default glyph variant is to sort
all CJK fonts into different font subdirectories based on their style
and then adjust the font path such that the preferred fonts appear
first. Setting the font path can be done globally in /etc/XF86Config or
locally via xset in the .xsession file.]
With UTF-8, there is zero reason to have different national
distributions of Linux packages and nobody wants these (except perhaps
for the language in which the provided printed handbook is shipped and
the default language with which the installation program greets you),
because product variants are a maintenance and testing nightmare.
Markus
--
Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK
Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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