From: Paolo Bonzini <pbonz...@redhat.com> The first two patches are improvement in documentation. The first fixes a broken link, the second avoids the distinction between British and American locales: most people are unaware of the different typographic conventions and also there is usually no English translation file.
The third and fourth implement the quoting standard that has been in use for seven years in GCC. In Unicode locales, quotes are replaced by the Unicode LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK and RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK. In non-Unicode locales, the left-pointing grave accent is replaced by the closing quote. This is against the GNU Coding Standards; however, I think it is preferrable because: * it promotes consistency between GNU programs. GCC is obviously not going to change; * no reasonable porting target renders ` and ' symmetrically (or at least no porting target that is reasonable to base our standards on). X11 does not anymore. The Linux framebuffer comes close, but the result is still very ugly. U+00B4 (ACUTE ACCENT) renders symmetrically, but it is not part of ASCII. It is not part of many ISO 8859 character sets and notably not of ISO 8859-15. * Unicode locales are widespread enough that the change is going to affect a very small minority. * the only other occurrence of `...' that I know of is M4 and TeX/Texinfo. Most GNU programs that use M4 will use m4sugar or changequote to map the quoting to [...]. TeX/Texinfo use `...' only in source code, just like (even after these patches) the "`" string remains only in C source, as a convention to represent the opening quote in translations. The only disadvantage would be that if your error message quotes a hard-coded string, it will have to use '...' in the source rather than `...'. Google Code Search hints that this should not to be a problem: http://www.google.com/codesearch#search/&q=%5Cbputs.*%60%20lang:c&type=cs has eighty results, many of them false positive or coming from old GCC releases. For more information, see http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html If the patch is accepted, I'll follow-up patching standards.texi. Paolo Paolo Bonzini (4): quotearg: fix Wikipedia link quotearg: do not distinguish en_GB and en_US locales quotearg: use Unicode quotes in UTF-8 locales when no translation is available quotearg: do not use grave accent for left quote lib/quotearg.c | 34 +++++++++++++++++++++++----------- lib/quotearg.h | 6 ++++-- modules/quotearg | 1 + 3 files changed, 28 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-) -- 1.7.7.1
