Re: Error message?

[Pavel Roskin <proski gnu org>]

Hello!

> results in:
> msgmerge ta.po mc.pot -o ta.new.po
> msgmerge: ta.po: warning: Charset "TSCII" is not a portable encoding name.
>                           Message conversion to user's charset might not
> work.
>
> This was the only "error" I noticed though.

The general rule is that if the message contains the word "warning" it's
not considered an error message, even if it's sent to stderr.

I tried to resolve this issue, but it's not so simple.  TSCII is not
officially standardized, and there is no way I can speed it up.  There is
a way to convert TSCII to Unicode, but I don't want to do it because this
conversion is unsupported by GNU libiconv, so users with TSCII fonts won't
be able to use them with mc.

The "right" solution would be to convert TSCII fonts to Unicode and start
using Unicode, but I don't think it's realistic.  It's very hard to switch
the encoding even for a small nation.

Another approach would be to register TSCII.  If you are concerned about
this situation, I suggest that you contact STC
(http://www.tamil.net/tscii/) and ask how you can help.  Maybe they simply
don't have enough money to submit an application.

Finally, you could contribute TSCII support for GNU libiconv.  It appears
that XFree86 already supports TSCII, so the lack of registration may not
be such a big problem, especially for Free Software Foundation.

I really don't want to remove the Tamil translation because of the
warning.  It takes a lot of efforts to translate the messages, and this
work should be respected regardless if it's a language spoken in a large
country or a language of a national minority struggling for independence.
I don't want political issues to affect this project.

-- 
Regards,
Pavel Roskin