Re: UTF8 encoding for all .po files

[Keld Jřrn Simonsen <keld dkuug dk>]

On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 05:47:42PM +0200, Kjartan Maraas wrote:
> ons, 2002-04-24 kl. 15:34 skrev Keld Jřrn Simonsen:
> > On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 12:13:51PM +0200, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote:
> > > Hi I'm thinking on recode all GNOME2's .po files into UTF8 before the
> > > release. Some teams are not working on translations and then those
> > > translations could cause problems on old systems (as old as a Debian
> > > Potato or RedHat 6.2).
> > > 
> > > What do you think?
> > > 
> > > Could I reencode all those files and commit them to cvs.gnome.org?
> > 
> > I think it would create some problems. I have experienced
> > quite a lot of problems with utf-8 files, because they
> > are not adhered to. That is, many make modifications
> > to utf-8 files in another charset, eg iso-8859-1.
> > And then one has to remedy these errors. I have lost
> > quite some hours on that account. 
> > 
> 
> I was skeptical to begin with too, but after upgrading to emacs-21 which
> supports UTF-8 in po-mode I've never looked back. :)
> 
> The only time I've had problems when editing files with non-UTF8 aware
> editors is while editing actual 8-bit chars, which makes it loose the
> encoding.

I am not going to change to emacs. And I am not just talking about
myself, but we are about 10 people doing translations to
danish and some are not so experienced. Shifting from iso-8859-1
will not go on without errors here.

And there is no need to shift to utf-8, as gettext can treat
all other encodings automatically with conversion to utf-8
if neccessary.

Best regards
keld