Restricting (human) language and character set in /usr/ports

[Doug Barton]

Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:
> On 1/14/07, Doug Barton <dougb at freebsd.org> wrote:
>> Andrew Pantyukhin wrote:
>> > It depends on what you mean by /status quo/, but in
>> > short, when I look at COMMENT, pkg-descr, pkg-message,
>> > comments in Makefile and other such text data, I
>> > expect to see English language and ASCII characters.
>> >
>> > There are ports that don't follow this expectation and
>> > I'd like to change that.
>>
>> I'm not sure it's quite so cut and dry as that. For example, I think
>> it's probably reasonable for the /usr/ports/<language> ports to have
>> some non-ascii stuff to start with.
> 
> I'm not against non-ascii, but there's no notion
> of character set in /usr/ports.

Now that is a whole different kettle of fish. :)

> I work in UTF-8
> and it's visible to me, as it is to many other
> people working in many different charsets.

Right, and the problem is only going to get worse as more people from
other countries and backgrounds get involved.

> There are several ways to deal with non-ascii
> characters, the two most effective being:
> (a) select a universal charset (I would love to
>    see UTF-8 in that role)

I think that's a conversation worth having.

> (b) introduce special markers, defining current
>    charset
> 
> I can not agree with people selecting random
> charsets and me having to guess them. Automated
> information brokers, like freshports, also have
> problems with this.

If you're going to open the can of worms involving the bigger picture,
then I'd rather refrain from picking nits in this context. If what
you're actually suggesting is, "Until we resolve this issue more
thoroughly, it would be nice if we were ascii-only in the official
parts of a port," you get no objection from me. I think for now it
might be reasonable to be more flexible with comments, but I won't
quibble.

> As for the language, I expect everything within
> the FreeBSD project to be present at least in
> English.

I think this is reasonable as a "lowest common denominator" type of
accommodation.

Doug

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