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

[Martin v. Loewis]

> No. You wouldn't hide these ImportErrors if you rely on the
> packages being installed. 

That's my point. Most applications don't really *rely* on them. It's a
matter of the data the user passes to the application. If data are
processed whose encoding is not known, then the application will get a
UnicodeError, which it will translate to some error message in
advance. It doesn't know or care what the specific encoding was - the
application itself only deals with Unicode strings.

> If the application doesn't care for the specific encodings being
> installed, then the administrator could add these imports to the
> sitecustomize.py module after installing the codec packages. I don't
> think that doing this automatically is a good idea.

I think it is, and apparently Tamito thinks that way as well, since
the JapaneseCodecs install themselves into the Python installation, to
be always available. You shouldn't attempt to declare some feature as
useless when there is a demonstrated need for it - instead, you should
strive to provide the feature somehow if you disagree with the
mechanism that is currently used to achieve it.

Regards,
Martin