[Catalog-sig] New PEP, pre-submission RFC

[Fred Drake]

On 4/29/05, Gerhard Haering <gh at ghaering.de> wrote:
> For those who have names with characters not in ASCII, is that possible?
> do we just define that all text is UTF-8?

Does anything other than ASCII work (reliably) now?  If not, I'm all
for declaring the serialized metadata to be UTF-8, and let distutils
check that when serializing (encoding Unicode as needed).

> Not that I really need it, but would this be the right time to think
> about optional description fields for other languages, too, like
> 
> Description-fr, Description-de for French and German ones?

The *.desktop files used by GNOME and KDE use an INI-style syntax with
the language code in brackets; modifying that for the RFC-2822 style
headers would be something like this:

Description[fr]: French description here.
Description[de]: German here.

I've no reason to think this is better, but it may be familiar to
some, which is better than inventing syntax whole-hog.

I'll note that the format generally has just one section, and the
first entry in the ones I just took a look at all said Encoding=UTF-8.
 Maybe it's a good idea to provide a way for the encoding to be
specified in the file, and require that apps be able to deal with
UTF-8 in whatever way is appropriate to them.  In many cases, copying
the bytes is the most that's needed, so that keeps things simple
anyway.


  -Fred

-- 
Fred L. Drake, Jr.    <fdrake at gmail.com>
Zope Corporation