Re: report on [bad] status of i18n of gnome apps - somebody should explicitly care about it

[Pablo Saratxaga <pablo mandrakesoft com>]

Kaixo!

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 12:03:25PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

> > On a Linux system the equivalent would be to always use utf-8 to store
> > physycally on the ext2 partitions, and have the GNU libc modified so
> > that functions dealing with file names transpartently call iconv() to
> > convert to/from the user encoding (if the user is not in utf-8).
> > 
> > That way utf-8 enabled programs could use utf-8 names for files; and
> > non utf-8 aware programs will simply have the libc convert the names for them.
> 
> Hmm, is this request known to glibc maintainers?

No, I just thought about it recently. You had the primacy of the news :)

> Else I'd also like to
> see a request for this added... :)
> 
> Of course, the glibc maintainers might just say that all locales should
> use utf-8 in the future...

I don't think it would be a problem (the glibc has a lot of support for all
kind of encodings; if they were agains adding support for non utf-8 encodings
there woouldn't be so much support).
Wait I'm afraid is that the behaviour of such functions may be defined
in some standard and that doing system specific conversion may be forbidden.
(of course extra functons could be made that do the conversion, but that
doesn't solve the problem, as the problem are the old programs that will use
the standard functions. That is also why I think the standard function must
allways have a full i18n'ed behaviour; leaving non i18n behaviour (which in
some cases is needed) to a different function, that explicitely tells it is
not i18n'ed.
Eg having foo() being ascii only and fooi18n() being the equivalent handling
internationalization is bad, as a lot of programmers will just don't care and
use foo(). foo() should be the fully i18n'ed one and fooascii() used for ascii
only.)
 

> 
> 
> Christian
> 
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> gnome-i18n@gnome.org
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-- 
Ki ça vos våye bén,
Pablo Saratxaga

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