Re: [gentoo-dev] Suggestion to stop using 'cjk' USE flag.

[Alastair Tse]

On Wed, 2003-07-02 at 20:36, Masatomo Nakano wrote:
> I suggest that we stop using 'cjk' USE flag, which is to support
> Chinese/Japanese/Korean, and we add new flags(lang_cn,lang_ja,lang_kr,....,m17n).

It would probably be lang_zh for chinese, to match the locale definition
in glibc. I've got a few questions:

1. What is the difference between m17n (multilingualisation) and i18n
(internationalisation)? Maybe we should use i18n instead of m17n since
it seems more widely used, especially if it means the same thing.

2. If it is only chinese, japanese and korean, maybe we should just use
zh, ja, kr as the USE flags. We have /usr/portage/use.desc to give it
the right description. Is there a reason to have the "lang_" prefix in
the USE flag?

> There are two reasons for this.
>
> 1. USE flag related to countries is only 'cjk' at the moment. But we
>    need other country flag(ex. Russia).
>
> 2. It is impossible to apply 1USE flag among two or more
>    countries because most of localization patches are conflict each other.

I agree that there are other countries that may have their own
localisation patches. However, some of the cjk patches do apply to all
double-byte character and kanji compatibility within applications. With
splitting the cjk USE flag, this means for those patches we'll likely
have to test for all 3 zh,ja,kr USE flags. 

With the conflicting patches, it should be up to the maintainer of the
package to make sure these patches don't conflict with each other with
different USE flag combinations. I don't think introducing more USE
flags will solve that problem, in fact it could potentially make it
worse.

With that said, I can see a number of advantages with having separate
language flags because there maybe chinese specific or japanese specific
patches that need to be installed. Or for instance, a chinese user would
not need to install japanese and korean fonts, and vice versa.

I agree with Nakano that the cjk/zh/ja/kr use flags should not be
confused with the LANGS discussion about selectively installing
translations (.po/.mo). This concerns mainly with patches and configure
options to specifically support XIM and double-byte characters.

My vote would be to _keep_ the "cjk" flag for instances where a patch or
particular configure option would benefit all double-byte character
users and then add the "zh", "ja" and "kr" USE flags as additional ones
where a particular patch/configure option is specific to only one
locale.

How do people think about that?

Cheers,
-- 
Alastair 'liquidx' Tse
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