Date: Tue, 17 Oct 1995 13:21:57 -0700 (MST) From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org> To: ache@astral.msk.su (=?KOI8-R?Q?=E1=CE=C4=D2=C5=CA_=FE=C5=D2=CE=CF=D7?=) Cc: kaleb@x.org, hackers@freefall.freebsd.org Subject: Re: A couple problems in FreeBSD 2.1.0-950922-SNAP Message-ID: <199510172021.NAA28228@phaeton.artisoft.com> In-Reply-To: <umAW-WmeD4@ache.dialup.demos.ru> from "=?KOI8-R?Q?=E1=CE=C4=D2=C5=CA_=FE=C5=D2=CE=CF=D7?=" at Oct 17, 95 08:29:46 pm
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> >> >If they ship Cyrillic fonts with their next release, they've indicated > >> >(to me at least) that their preference is to use the ISO8859-5 encoding. > >> > >> Sigh. Why they not asking what preferences russsians have? > > >Because the X Consortium is a Standards Body. When there is an existing > >standard for something we prefer to follow it (Like RFC 821/822). In the > >face of a "real" standard, a de facto standard doesn't count. > > What do you mean by "real"? KOI8-R has two references now, they are > RFC 1489 (description) and RFC 1700 (registration as valid MIME > charset name). Is it enough for "real"? If you mean only ISO by "real", > why you refer RFC 822? This is a transfer encoding format. This is very different than a character set standard. You will need to send a representative to your national standards body which is your countries ISO standards body representative member, and it will need to petition ISO for modification of 8859-1. Barring that, you will need to get you national standards body to codify KOI-8 as a regional standard. If this is "what Russians prefer", then they should, as a whole, tell us that that's what they prefer by codifying the standard. The fact that 8859-5 is codified and KOI-8 is not is a strong argument that 8859-5 is preferred in general, even if you in particular don't prefer it. If this isn't the actual case, then the way to notify us of your preference change is to codify it, either as a regional standard, so that it can be a "supported for commnications in the locale", or preferrably as a change to the formal ISO standard, so that it can be "an extra-nationally recognized character set". As things stand, the only extra-nationally recognized standard for Cyrillic is 8859-5, period. The only real issue here is that formal internationalization is required for programs to use informal standards. KOI-8 would not be a formally acceptable ISO 8859-x standard because of the 8859-x layout rules violations it engages in -- the same reason it would not benefit equally with 8859-1..8 for a 8859-1 C locale. Formal internationalization is also required even in a 8859-1 locale for collation sequence, etc., so the discrepancies between 8859-1 and 8859-5 are larely irrelevant compared to the discrepancies between 8859-1 (or 5) and KOI-8. You can have your preferred standard, and your preferred encoding, but you will have to pay for it in code localization effort. The question you have to answer is "how do I want to pay?". With the 8859-5 encoding, you pay in conversion of legacy data. With KOI-8, you pay in code localization. It's your choice, but you will pay, one way or another, for historical use of KOI-8. It's just a matter of "how" and "when". Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.
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