Re: Stable ab/i18n branch

From: Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab@gmail.com>
Date: Oct 15, 2010, 05:16 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTim0a7J5L1dtZNYTG7strEhjitZein5CVQayZFRh@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20101015000749.GD29494@burratino>

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 00:07, Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com> wrote:

Show 11 quoted lines

> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:
>> While that's not a perfect solution I think it's the best we're going
>> to get for the time being. I'm pretty convinced that if I tried to
>> make git itself LC_CTYPE-safe as part of this already huge series it'd
>> never get merged. Having messages with question marks from strerror()
>> on certain platforms is an OK compromise in my opinion.
>
> The question marks[1] are what I was referring to.  Consider this from
> the point of view of someone working on the Debian package: would
> users consider that an appropriate or positive change for squeeze+1?
> (Hint: not if it doesn't come with some benefit in their locale, no.)

No benefit? The benefit is that the program they previously either didn't understand or understood poorly is now talking to them in their native language. That's a pretty big benefit.

The tradeoff is that a small subset of the messages which include strerror() output will show non-ASCII characters as question marks on GNU systems.

Don't get me wrong. I think it's a bug that we need to fix. I just think it's a relatively minor annoyance, not a showstopper. With it the feature *mostly* just works, and the things that don't can be documented by the Debian maintainer and others as a known bug.

> I suspect making git work with other LC_CTYPE would not actually be
> too hard[2].  Such fixes are useful for futureproofing and increased
> sanity anyway --- they do not have to be part of the l10n branch imho.

It's something we want yes, but not something I have time for these days. So unless someone else is interested in helping audit all that code, providing a printf() fallback on glibc etc. it'll block the i18n series.

For something I at least think is a relatively minor issue that doesn't warrant throwing the baby out with the bathwater.