Hello, the release notes need to contain a note to users using the german locale along the lines:
The Debian Project apologies for the unfortunate german quoting on the
command line interface. A solution is worked on, but unfortunately
hasn't made it into Sarge. As a workaround, switching to a UTF-8 based
locale will avoid the problem.
Rational:
The current quoting for german locales (german, swiss, austrian, ...)
tries to mimic proper german quoting (if UTF-8 is not present) and
fails miserably:
Opening quotes: ,,
Closing quotes: "
The opening quotes use 2 characters, are visually clearly different
from the closing quotes and users are confused because they read the
opening quotes as "two commas" and not "opening quote". Consider
[EMAIL PROTECTED]:/scratch/incoming/MO/jan02$ /bin/mv -iv bla ~
,,bla" -> ,,/home/helge/bla"
,,bla" entfernt
Bugs have been filled on this issue quite a while back ([1], [2]). The
entire list [3] has expressed that the this behaviour is highly
undesirable. Essentially two solutions have been proposed, and
intensivly discussed[4]:
A) Using the same quotes as in english, i.e., ""
B) Using inversed french quotes »«
The vast majority (c.f. the thread starting at [4]) believes that either
solution is much better than the current state. However, the
glibc-maintainers expressed concernes about diverging from upstream
and pointed out that the bugs where minor and (implicitly) should be
fixed at some later stage.
Hence the appology is needed, since -- given Debians history -- users of
stable employing a german locale will experience the (unambiguously
perceived as ugly) quotes for the years to come.
The (almost) complete discussion is archived both in various threads
on debian-l10n-german and in the bug reports [1] and [2].
Please CC: me as I am not subscribed to debian-release.
Greetings
Helge
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=228486
[2} http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=235759
[3] http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-german/2004/07/msg00172.html
[4] http://lists.debian.org/debian-l10n-german/2004/07/msg00149.html
--
Helge Kreutzmann, Dipl.-Phys. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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