Re: Quotation marks: Using “” instead of ""

[Dave Neary <bolsh gnome org>]

Iain * wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 11:20 AM, Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> wrote:
>> In LANG=C you call gtk_label_new with UTF-8 strings. What happens at that
>> point depends if gtk_label_new ever calls a single C library function
>> that is locale dependant (eg strcasecmp).
> 
> All of GTK is utf-8 compatible.
> This is the point we're trying to make.

I"m increasingly mystified by this discussion.

Lots of people use non-UTF8 locales - most of the people I know send
iso-8859-15 emails and when I send UTF8 emails they end up seeing €¥ or
whatever instead of é. I can imagine that lots of Linux users use
non-UTF8 locales for their UI. I don't know if there are any stats for
this, but a couple of people working with distributions have said so.

Alan's made a reasonable argument that we shouldn't be using non-ascii
in C source files. It's not standard. He's made a reasonable argument
that in the case where a string is untranslated, or the user chooses the
C locale, the output string will be the input string, and if the input
string is non-ASCII UTF-8, then strange and unexpected things will happen.

This is starting to sound to me like change for change's sake. I don't
see any decent reason to make the change (other than the "proper" quotes
look better, even if they're harder to type), and credible people have
pointed out a significant potential for breakage in a change like this.

Prudence suggests backing down and letting the subject drop would be the
best course of action. If there are UTF8 strings being passed to gettext
currently, perhaps that's the problem that needs to be fixed.

Cheers,
Dave.

-- 
Dave Neary
GNOME Foundation member
bolsh gnome org