On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 11:30:07PM -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > Cesar Eduardo Barros wrote: > > I think debconf should use UTF-8 for the templates and recode on the fly. > > Well, if you send in a patch, I will consider it.
Probably libc ought to support it (when there is all the i18n stuff built in). Maybe it already does, who knows... > > > There's nothing worse than having gibberish in ten different charsets in the > > same template file. > > This is why the template file is the "compiled" form. You're intended to > merge together a bunch of files that just have one (or 2, with English) > languages in them. See debconf-mergetemplate(1). even so... For the beginning I would propose something like this to go into policy: Documentation of debian packages, if written in language requiring characters outside of 7-bit ASCII range, should use either well-established encoding for the given language (such as ISO-8859-2 for some central- and easter europe languages, KOI8-R for Russian, JIS for Japanese etc...), or UTF-8 encoding. Maintainers are being encouradged to use UTF-8, having in mind the general tendency toward unified character encoding. Original upstream documentation, if in encoding other than UTF-8 _or_ the well-established encoding for the particular language, should be converted either to UTF-8 or to the well-established encoding. Choice between UTF-8 and other encoding is left at the maintainer discretion, however, one package should (must?) have all the documentation in one consistent encoding. Names of maintainers, upstream authors and other data in packages' descriptions and related data files (such as debian/changelog, debian/control), as well as in English language documentation, should be either transliterated or transcribed to ASCII, or used in UTF-8 encoding - again, at the discretion of the maintainer. However, for names in scripts based on non-latin alphabets, ASCII (or suitable latin-script) version should be provided along with original name. -- ----------------------------------------------------------- | Radovan Garabik http://melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk/~garabik/ | | __..--^^^--..__ garabik @ melkor.dnp.fmph.uniba.sk | ----------------------------------------------------------- Antivirus alert: file .signature infected by signature virus. Hi! I'm a signature virus! Copy me into your signature file to help me spread!
