On Tue, 2008-02-26 at 18:52 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote: > You do a wonderful job of explaining what's wrong with us trying to > adjust upstream's name to be ASCII but I just want to be certain we're > on the same page by the end: > > Package names should follow upstream since attempting to transliterate > or translate upstream names can't be done sanely on our side. For > things that map easily into the ASCii set (diacritic/accented > characters, for instance, as found in latin-1) a transliterated Provides > can be added to make installation easier for ASCii-conditioned users but > carrying this on to other scripts is a losing proposition. That's exactly what I was trying to explain, yes. Sorry for the rambling if it seemed that way. Rethinking this though, I feel that accented and diacritic-related characters (á, ë, õ, ñ, æ, et al.) would be quite suitable but we would have to pay attention to the language of origin. For our example here, the transliterations would probably be simply removing the diacritic as appropriate: a, e, o, n, and ae. In some languages, though, the diacritic differentiates the character from the "plain" form. For example, a Spanish package name for a similar studying software could be "¡Estudiará!" (third-person indicative future tense; literally, "You will study!"). However, we would need to be careful here because, without that accent, this changes the conjugation to "estudiara," which is the first- and third-person imperfect subjunctive (which really makes no sense on its own, since the subjunctive tense is meant to be used in a subjective or predictive clause of a sentence, such as referring to one's wants and desires for the future). Also, transliterating ñ if we know the source language to be Spanish (or other similar languages) would change it a bit, since it's actually pronounced as "ny-": "Ño" would be pronounced as "nyo"; "ñat" would be "nyat" and so on. (Not that these are actual words, but they are parts thereof.) If we allowed accents and whatnot, maybe we should restrict the transliteration to simply removing all diacritics and splitting "merged" letters (æ --> ae, etc.). That way we would not have to worry too much more. (Again, using Spanish as an example due to familiarity.) However, trying to force things into ASCII or even some variation of roman-alphabet text is going to be extremely difficult and quite confusing for languages for which that is not the norm. I just though of another example for my previous message. (Jee, I seem to love these. Apologies...) What happens when the package name is only Han characters? Do we transliterate it to the Japanese (Kanji) reading, or the Korean (Hanja) reading, or the native Chinese reading? :P But I digress. Thanks for your time. -- Peter Gordon (codergeek42) GnuPG Public Key ID: 0xFFC19479 / Fingerprint: DD68 A414 56BD 6368 D957 9666 4268 CB7A FFC1 9479
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