Re: non-ASCII characters in locale.alias file

[Tomohiro KUBOTA]

Hi,

At 22 Jan 2002 15:11:46 -0800,
Ulrich Drepper wrote:

> > LANG=foobar must be written well in every locales which glibc supports.
> > I.e., I should be able to change locale into "fran?ais" from, for
> > example, UTF-8 or EUC-JP locales.
> 
> Which is why you can use LANG=french.  The français name is just for
> convenience of those use used it.

Well, this is the reason why we can safely remove 'fran?ais'
from locale.alias file.  If I can use LANG=french, all people in
the world can use LANG=french.


> You'll perhaps notice that I haven't anything recently and don't
> intend to.  It is not worth the trouble.  The locale settings should
> happen using the real names and the "complexity" of figuring these out
> should be hidden via an interface similar to that which exists to
> select timezones (see the tzselect script).

You mean, uses should not edit /etc/locale.alias ?
However, usage of ISO-8859-1 (non-ASCII, even non-UTF-8)
characters in locale.alias means developers (who are learning
i18n) to think "Look, even locale.alias file uses ISO-8859-1
characters.  This file must have been written by i18n expert
and this shows that usage of ISO-8859-1 in system-wide files
is a good idea."  These people will grow up as bad developers.
(During my work of internationalizing softwares, I often feel
difficulties around global usage of ISO-8859-1 characters.
Such situation does avoid progress of i18n.)

If you really think usage of ISO-8859-1 here is not a bad idea,
you will probably think usage of UTF-8 is also not a bad idea.
Since ISO-8859-1 is a local encoding, you should admit usage of
other local encodings like EUC-JP.  Since GNU libc distribution
has only one locale.alias file, it means that the file is encoded
in mixture of ISO-8859-1, UTF-8, and EUC-JP.  It is completely
illegal.

If you think locale.alias should not be edited by general users,
developers need to edit it.  And more, such interface software
like tzselect is not available now.

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