[I18n-sig] Intro + Encoding names issue

Martin v. Loewis martin@v.loewis.de
Sun, 28 Oct 2001 08:33:41 +0100


> If everybody agrees with pointing Python at Tamito's package for the
> encodings he supports in his package, then I think we should simply
> add these aliases to the core encodings package. He did a great
> job on those codecs and the licenses fit in as well.

I don't like this approach. There must be a solution that allows
installation of additional codecs without modifying the core, and
there is one.

Furthermore, there are alternative codecs for Japanese, e.g. the iconv
codec also supports euc-jp if the underlying iconv implementation
supports it; most do. If euc-jp would be a built-in alias to
japanese.euc-jp, and if the japanese package is not installed, the
iconv codec would have no chance of finding it.

Finally, I think this would be misuse of the aliases
mechanism. Aliases should convert to the canonical form of the
character set name. I'd argue that the canonical form is the name that
IANA has assigned to this character set, or atleast the alias that
IANA designates as preferred MIME name. For euc-jp, the name is
Extended_UNIX_Code_Packed_Format_for_Japanese; the preferred MIME name
is EUC-JP. Installing an alias that converts euc-jp to japanese.euc-jp
is definitely wrong.

Regards,
Martin