Re: lynx-dev Re: lynx should respect LANG

[Klaus Weide]

On Wed, 24 May 2000, Vlad Harchev wrote:

> On Wed, 24 May 2000, Henry Nelson wrote:
> 
> > I can do without the "force people" stuff.  If you need to make a Debian
> > for dummies, just do a ln -s trick.

And have to distribute 20-or-so different lynx.cfg files, all only slightly
different?  Or create a customized lynx.cfg or .lynxrc each time lynx is
called?

It's ugly, it's overhead, it's system-dependent.
Sure, you probably need something like this if you want lynx to adapt
to different terminal emulators (COLOR scheme, ...), for example, or
want to point it to different start and help files depending on language.
But I think the point that you shouldn't *have* to do this, just to
make lynx come up in the right display character set for non Latin-1
users in common situations, is a valid one.

> > How do you guys think sendmail handles
> > all the Japanese encoding problems out there?  

With country-specific hacks that encourage people to use outdated
versions, with know security holes, whenever the patches are not yet
available for the latest offical version?

(*partially* guessing here.)

> > Nice little wrapper lets
> > you do different in/out decoding on an individual user basis.  No sweat.
> 
>   This is obvious and I hope it will be convincing for people (but IMO we
> should put something besides JP stuff in this wrapper, otherwise other parts
> of the world will treat as "lynx for japanese" and will use the binary
> directly).

I don't see you working on such a wrapper that does "something besides
JP stuff", for general distribution, so I think the "we should" is
misplaced.  Actually, the Debian-JP maintainer tried this, but the
result falls short of being right or useful for much more than
Japanese users.  For example, he probably doesn't know which
Latin-based languages require ISO-8859-2 as opposed to ISO-8859-1.
And it's all very Linux-specific, even Debian-specific (as he admits).

   Klaus


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