From owner-freebsd-doc Thu Jun 24 18:28: 0 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-doc@freebsd.org Received: from dfw-ix7.ix.netcom.com (dfw-ix7.ix.netcom.com [206.214.98.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D4CD6152BF; Thu, 24 Jun 1999 18:27:53 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from asami@cs.berkeley.edu) Received: (from smap@localhost) by dfw-ix7.ix.netcom.com (8.8.4/8.8.4) id UAA25852; Thu, 24 Jun 1999 20:27:42 -0500 (CDT) Received: from sji-ca4-28.ix.netcom.com(205.186.212.156) by dfw-ix7.ix.netcom.com via smap (V1.3) id rma025834; Thu Jun 24 20:27:31 1999 Received: (from asami@localhost) by silvia.hip.berkeley.edu (8.9.3/8.6.9) id SAA82661; Thu, 24 Jun 1999 18:27:16 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 24 Jun 1999 18:27:16 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199906250127.SAA82661@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: silvia.hip.berkeley.edu: asami set sender to asami@cs.berkeley.edu using -f To: nclayton@lehman.com Cc: nik@nothing-going-on.demon.co.uk, doc@freebsd.org, freebsd-translate@ngo.org.uk, tech-jp@jp.freebsd.org, cvs@freebsd.org In-reply-to: <19990624111012.L15628@lehman.com> (message from Nik Clayton on Thu, 24 Jun 1999 11:10:12 +0100) Subject: Re: FDP Directory Reorganisation From: asami@freebsd.org (Satoshi - Ports Wraith - Asami) References: <19990603195027.A31941@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> <37593369.10E2888D@sky.rim.or.jp> <19990607233227.A34938@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> <199906162246.PAA02177@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu> <19990617194856.A26011@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> <199906172252.PAA11221@vader.cs.berkeley.edu> <199906181152.EAA24735@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu> <199906231041.DAA51528@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu> <19990623231108.A71294@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> <199906232344.QAA55779@silvia.hip.berkeley.edu> <19990624111012.L15628@lehman.com> Sender: owner-freebsd-doc@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org * From: Nik Clayton * Because while the files will only exist in one place in the CVS repository, * they might exist in several places when they are installed. All examples you have given install things in one directory -- the one with the same name as the repository -- and adds various symlinks to make it accessible under different locations. Let me rephrase the question. You said before: > Doesn't apply. I'm not asking that the installation directory change, > just the directory in which it's held in the CVS repository. Can we take this as you are *not* going to change the installation directory as a result of the CVS repository change? As long as manpages and handbooks stay in {man,doc}/ja etc., the impact to ordinary users and the ports collection is minimal and we can live with that. * Consider the Japanese translations. * * Right now we only have one encoding, EUC-JP in the repository. What's * more, we can mechanically convert from EUC to ShiftJIS encoding (at least, * I've been told on this list that we can do that). Yes, mostly. They are basically just different code table -> bit pattern functions for the same language. In fact, the conversion is purely arithmetic so there is a simple mathematical formula to convert between the three. (I.e., you don't even need a table lookup, as will be the case if you want to convert between the three and Unicode, but that's another story.) * Now suppose that you're a Chinese admin, and you've got the choice of * documentation that is available in two different encodings. * * You can install both of them (because the encoding names don't clash) * and use a symlink from /usr/share/doc/zh to point to whichever one you * want to be 'local preferred format'. By the way, are you aware that Mandarin, Cantonese and Taiwanese are actually very different languages? Danish, Swedish and Norwegians are much closer to each other than the four major dialects in China. For instance, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian people can easily understand each other by everyone just speaking their own language -- the same doesn't apply to Chinese. (Although the most of the Shanghainise speakers and some Cantonese speakers are living in the mainland and have been forced to learn Mandarin too -- similar to Polish and Russian until 10 years ago.) So it's really not very likely that your hypothetical "Chinese admin" would want to install documents in both formats and point a "zh" symlink to the "preferred format" -- it's not like many people can understand both anyway. It's much more realistic to treat them as different languages, such as English and Russian. They don't even use the same set of letters. Besides, what you've proven here is that there could be cases where you might want a language plus the territory -- it has nothing to do with encoding/codesets. zh[_CN] and zh_TW would be enough to distinguish between the two (and that's exactly what X/Open is doing as you can see in /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/locale). * Suppose that you have 3 pieces of documentation about printing on Unix. : * with links to all the installed documentation, nicely categorised. * * How cool is that, eh? :-) Cool, but I have no idea what this has to do with the name of language-specific directories. :) * No it's not (as a repository directory name). Directories in the repository * will be encoding the language, location, and encoding. I want this to be * an inviolate rule -- if we need it for one language, then, for future * proofing, we need it for all. You know, I really wish you guys learn more about our languages before making sweeping generalizations like this. The Asian languages are all quite different from European languages in many ways, and they are all more of exceptions than the rule when it comes to language/encoding landscapes. As I said above, "Chinese" is not one language in terms of people being able to understand each other. The differences between the three major encodings in Japanese are much closer than that of Chinese, because they all basically start from the same code table but use different bit patterns to encode them. * Consider what happens as and when we provide a mechanism to mechanically * translate from EUC to ShiftJIS (for example). There are quite a few of those in ports/japanese already.... * I am 100% dead set against this being something like * * ja * ja_JP.ShiftJIS * * directories instead. This is inconsistent with how the rest of the tree * will be organised, and will required kludges anywhere the directory name * is split apart in to its constituent components to take account of the * fact that one of the Japanese directories is named differently. I'm against something like that too. I just don't think any of your strawman arguments hold water in real life. Considering the trivialities of differences in encoding in Japanese, the pain we had to go through when we changed the installation directories last time, and the fragility of locale names (as I said, there are at least five major variants out there today -- ja, ja_JP.EUC, ja_JP.ujis, ja_JP.eucJP, ja_JP.EUC-JP -- all meaning "Japanese EUC"), I am absolutely 100% against changing installation directory names for Japanese documents. If we want to be able to refer to them with different names, the symlinks should be from those longer names to ja, not the other way around. It doesn't make sense to me that you would want to change the CVS repository names for documents without changing installation directories, but if that's what you want, that's your prerogative. Satoshi To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-doc" in the body of the message