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non-ASCII characters in locale.alias file


From: Tomohiro KUBOTA
Subject: non-ASCII characters in locale.alias file
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 20:33:30 +0900
User-agent: Wanderlust/2.8.1 (Something) SEMI/1.14.3 (Ushinoya) FLIM/1.14.3 (Unebigoryōmae) APEL/10.3 Emacs/20.7 (i386-debian-linux-gnu) MULE/4.1 (AOI)

Hi,

I found two non-ASCII characters, which may be intended to be ISO-8859-1.

(intl/locale.alias 30)
bokm?l          no_NO.ISO-8859-1

(intl/locale.alias 41)
fran?ais        fr_FR.ISO-8859-1

(I wrote these non-ASCII characters using "?" because I am using
EUC-JP based system and I cannot use ISO-8859-1 character now.)

I think usage of non-ASCII characters here is invalid.
(In future, we may or may not use UTF-8).

I propose to remove these alias names.  For people who really need
compatibility to old system (though I don't think there are any
such people, because these locale names are aliases), some instructions
how to add ISO-8859-1 locale names may be written in some documents.

Reasons:


1. Usage of ISO-8859-1 encoding is legal only under ISO-8859-1 locales.
   Since all system files are locale-independent, only ASCII characters
   (i.e., valid characters in "C" locale) can be used.  (In future it
   may or may not be UTF-8, if "C" locale would mean UTF-8).

2. Imagine when people want to use locale names.  It is when people
   want to configure their locale environments.  When people want to
   configure their locale environment, it is natural that their locale
   environment is not yet configured.  Thus, there are nobody who want
   to use ISO-8859-1 locale names legally.

3. Even if we were really need to use non-ASCII characters in locale.alias,
   usage of ISO-8859-1 encoding should be avoided because it is local
   encoding for 15 European languages, just like TIS-620 is Thai local
   and KOI8-R is Russian local.  Usage of local encoding here means
   "biased" to specific languages.  (Of course, usage of multiple
   encodings in one file is illegal.)  UTF-8 should be the only
   candidate for this purpose.  (I think all of you agree that mixing
   multiple encodings in one file is obviously illegal.)  Thus,
   commenting out these two locale alias names would be insufficient.

4. Especially, locale.alias (and other locale-related files) should
   be a good example or copybook for other i18n-learning people.
   Usage of illegal characters should be thus strongly discouraged.

5. If such bad locale names are written in locale.alias, new users
   (not only people who _really_ need it for compatibility purpose and
   who know what they are doing) will use these names.  It should not
   occur because it helps more and more people will have wrong idea on
   i18n.  (The reason why this should be avoided is that this may help
   appearance of more and more i18n-novice developers.)

6. People can do without such ISO-8859-1 locale names because these
   locale names are aliases.  Use the original names or other aliases
   and people will be happy.

---
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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