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Re: non-ASCII characters in locale.alias file


From: Tomohiro KUBOTA
Subject: Re: non-ASCII characters in locale.alias file
Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2002 11:45:38 +0900
User-agent: Wanderlust/2.8.1 (Something) SEMI/1.14.3 (Ushinoya) FLIM/1.14.3 (Unebigoryƍmae) APEL/10.3 Emacs/20.7 (i386-debian-linux-gnu) MULE/4.1 (AOI)

At 22 Jan 2002 17:39:49 -0800,
Ulrich Drepper wrote:

> All this goes on for too long.  Ignore the file, it's not important
> and shouldn't be used.

No, this is an important problem.  If you don't think so, it might
be because you are an 8bit-language speaker.

If you don't think this is an important problem, why do you stick
to preserve these two locale aliases?


> > Thus I proposed in the original message to write some instructions
> > in some document files how to add these two ISO-8859-1 locale names
> > to locale.alias file.
> 
> And I've repeatedly said this need not exclusively be ISO-8859-1.

Yes, it is a valid byte sequence even in, for example, KOI8-R.
However, the byte sequence is invalid in UTF-8 and EUC-JP.


> > If no encoding is assumed for a byte sequence, it is called "binary
> > data", not "text data".
> 
> No.  The difference is in the structure.  The locale.alias file is
> still line based and therefore a text file.

Confused idea I sometimes find in people who don't know i18n....
Every text files are written in specific encodings.  There are no
encoding-free text file.  I didn't imagine a well-trained developer
like you say such a thing....

For example, do you think /etc/locale.alias is encoded in ISO-8859-1
or EBCDIC?  Do you think many users feel /etc/locale.alias is
likely to be ISO-8859-1 than EBCDIC?  Can you say "no"?

/etc/locale.alias is obviously intended to be a text file.
It is _not_ EBCDIC.  It is _not_ KOI8-R, though it can be
regarded as a valid KOI8-R byte sequence.  In case of UTF-8
and EUC-JP, the file cannot even be a valid byte sequence.


> > Do you mean /etc/locale.alias is a binary file?  (If so, it is
> > natural that we cannot edit binary file using text editors.)
> 
> You don't use Emacs?  I can edit all files.

1. I can everytime edit the file using Emacs if I assume the
   file is mere a byte sequence without any encoding.

2. If I am in ISO-8859-1 locale, I can edit the file using
   Emacs as the writer of the file intended.

3. If I am in KOI8-R locale, I can edit the file using Emacs
   but characters are different from the original writer's intension.

4. If I am in UTF-8 locale, I cannot edit the file.  If I
   forced to edit it, the file will be broken.

Anyway, I am using Emacs on EUC-JP terminal.

---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <address@hidden>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N"  http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/



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