[I18n-sig] Codecs for Big Five and GB 2312

[Martin v. Loewis]

> If you don't want to bother with importing the codec packages
> in your application, you can use the sitecustomize.py module
> to do the imports at startup time.

I don't think that's an acceptable solution. Having the superuser
modify sitecustomize.py won't work on most installations.

> Another possibly approach would be creating a new codec top
> level package "sitecodecs" which is then used as pool for
> all site specific codecs and also searched by the encodings search
> function if present.

That's one solution; another is to have distutils support installation
of additional codecs, and making them "known".

> The standard distribution will probably not include the
> Asian codecs -- just like it doesn't include all the other
> goodies which people are fond of. Instead, Python distribution
> packagers like ActivePython will ship versions of Python which
> include these extra packages.
> 
> At least that's the idea behind keeping the Python core rather
> small and maintainable.

Myself, I don't see that as a problem. What *is* important that users
requiring additional codecs can be given instructions as simple as
'python setup.py install'.

Regards,
Martin