Re: GNU gettext-0.10.36 for non-ASCII msgid

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Sun, Apr 08, 2001 at 09:30:18PM +0200, Keld Jørn Simonsen wrote:

>> How about fixing all the msgid's which have any non-ASCII character?
> 
> That might be limiting English too much. You have words like naïve
> and some words with æ in proper English spelling. And then there
> are a number of developers that spell their names with non-ascii
> characters. I would myself feel quite offended if my name was
> misspelled because of silly ascii restrictions.

The problem is: in what encoding would be the strings in sources?
iso-8859-1? koi8-r? jis0x208? utf-8? depending on the main author?
depending on the release date?

IMHO the sources must have only ascii.
If English needs some special non-ascii chars for some strings, then 
have a en.po file to fill those special cases.

> On the other hand I see the practicallity of it. The problem
> will eventually go away when we shift to utf-8

Yes, but we are not there yet, and the non-ascii strings in sources are
in other encodings than utf-8 anyway!

The problem is that until *everybody* switches to utf-8 (authors and
translators) the msgid entry in the po files will cause problems, as it may
be changed by the program used by the translator and so the corresponding
msgstr may point to a differently encoded msgid; that is, the string won't
be translated. I have already the case and I have to manually correct
such problems with some xmms translations as the sources include 8bit
iso-8859-1 chars.

> 
> Keld
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-i18n mailing list
> gnome-i18n@gnome.org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n

-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

http://www.srtxg.easynet.be/		PGP Key available, key ID: 0x8F0E4975