[fedora-ja-list] [Bug 136290] Add Japanese SJIS locale

[bugzilla ＠ redhat.com]

Please do not reply directly to this email. All additional
comments should be made in the comments box of this bug report.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=136290





------- Additional Comments From rees ＠ ddcom.co.jp  2004-10-25 02:00 -------
I know this is officially CLOSED, NOTFIX, but this needs to be said by
a foreigner who understands the problem.

I have no fond feelings for shift-JIS. I have written code to parse
it, so I know how broken the encoding scheme is.

However, the numbers Nakai quotes don't tell even one percent of the
story. 

You simply aren't going to find business documents encoded in
ja_JP.eucJP. Business documents encoded in ja_JP.UTF-8 exist, but not
where even your ordinary geek is going to find them. I personally
don't see non-shifted JIS business documents in a typical day in the
almost typical Japanese IT business office where I work, and those are
at least an order of magnitude more common than documents in ja_JP.UTF-8.

Japanese implies shift-JIS in the desktop world.

There is no way to shoehorn shift-JIS support into the suit-and-tie
RedHat Linux distributions without pumping it through Fedora. That's
why it is not just a business-side issue. If you want Japanese people
to be able to use Linux on the desktop, you have to understand that
Linux shall support shift-JIS before it succeeds on the Japanese desktop.

Frankly, any application that can only deal with UTF-8 has a high
probability of not really dealing properly with UTF-8. (In other
words, those are broken in the Japanese context any way you look at
it.) I know that the only way to do this is to go beyond the standards
the Unicode Consortium has given us, and to look hard where Microsoft
is saying, "nothing here, move on". It will require a parallel
standard of suggested internal encodings, I suppose, so that we can
mathematically convert between the local version locales using local
encodings and the international version locales using Unicode. But it
has to be done sometime.

Sorry to be so pointy headed in a bug report, but there is no way to
understand the bug without the context. 



------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
You are on the CC list for the bug, or are watching someone who is.