Re: adding intl/locale.alias entry

[Chiaki Ishikawa <Chiaki dot Ishikawa at personal-media dot co dot jp>]

X-PMC-CI-e-mail-id: 13942 

    GOTO Masanori <gotom@debian.or.jp> writes:

    > We Japanese had been used locale name as 'ja_JP.ujis',
    > but in now we are moving to use 'ja_JP.eucJP' instead of
    > ja_JP.ujis. This patch adds an alias entry data to maintain
    > for back compatibility.

    Is it a good idea to add this?  I've been told before that ja_JP.ujis
    never really was used.

Being a Japanese programmer, 
I have never used this ja_JP.ujis on my office Sun workstations.

*HOWEVER*, on my home PC running linux where glibc has been used for
sometime, I HAVE USED ja_JP.ujis for some years now.
I have no idea who picked up this ja_JP.ujis for packaging
purposes in the first place on linux, but this 
has been used throughout many configuation files, and
distribution binaries and such.

So using this ja_JP.ujis is rather a de facto standard
for a newbie linux users who couldn't figure out initially
what locale setting was used, etc..
On many linux distributions (I use Debian), many tools come as
pre-packaged and I need to go with the flow. The flow includes
the choice of ja_JP.ujis locale setting.

Come to think of it, the lack of ja_JP.ujis from GLIBC
would break my login script (rather subsequent
terminal emulator font selection and such) since
I set LANG to ja_JP.ujis first thing in my .bashrc.
(On linux, that is.)

From my .bashrc :
    # : /ide-s-master/tools/GAP-DIR/gap4r2/bin
    GAPDIR=/ide-s-master/tools/GAP-DIR/gap4r2
    PATH=$HOME/bin:$GAPDIR/bin:$PATH
    export PATH

    LANG=ja_JP.ujis
    export LANG

	...
(Sorry for my non-imaginative choice of the directory name
for gap group theoretic calculation package.)

Again, I have *NEVER* used the ja_JP.ujis on my office
Sun workstations and stuck to EUC variants there. (Come to think of
it, even on pre-compaq DEC MIPS workstations, too. But my memory is
hazy now.)
So, frankly speaking, when I picked up Debian GNU/Linux distribution
I was bothered with this ja_JP.ujis stuff that was unfamiliar, 
but had to live with it and things went OK and after the initial
hesitation.  I have never thought about it until today.

I think the people who told you that ja_JP.ujis never really was used
are probably the established higher-end workstation UNIX users and
they may never have known the use of ja_JP.ujis on linux, say, Debian
distribution for the last few years at least.

I don't know much about what the folks have done on FreeBSD, or
NetBSD, and can't speak for them.

The alias would ease the transition for folks like me who have
followed the accepted Japanese locale in the
various Japanese-related packages from www.debian.org.
(Aha, I see Goto-san is from Debian?)


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     Ishikawa, Chiaki        ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp.NoSpam  or         
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