Re: UTF-8 in GNOME2 po files

[Dick Porter <dick ximian com>]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2002 at 01:13:38PM +0100, Xavier Bestel wrote:
> 
> Errm, I must admit I had an epidermic reaction when I read your mail. I
> shouldn't have posted this, sorry. Still I fail to see how requiring a
> glibc upgrade for rh6.2 (or debian potato) non-english users works for
> everyone.

No, I'm saying that people with debian potato or rh6.2 shouldn't _require_
a glibc update, but they have to choose if they want the best language
support or not.  The feature doesnt come for free.

If they want to use a non-english locale, their translator might have used
UTF8 so they might not notice any problem.

On the other hand, it might be that every translator decides to use UTF8,
so the problem doesnt exist anyway.  I don't know how inconvenient it would
be for some of the eastern languages, because I've only ever had to deal
with latin-1 myself.  This is something that each translator will have to
decide on. I didn't know about recode, so if it works flawlessly
that might be built into the Makefile.

> 
> > As it happens, we can support both schemes simultaneously for the best of
> > all worlds: have translators use UTF8 if thats convenient for them (and
> > their language) and have the code check for support for automatic charset
> > conversions.
> 
> And what if the check fails ? "You can't use Gnome2 on that system,
> please upgrade" ?

The check is a compile time feature test, so the distribution has to make
the choice: best-possible language support, or stick with older glibc.

- Dick