Hello, I really don't know how to express what I want to say :) It has come to my mind a few days ago when the Vera fonts were released to public. My problem was: everybody was acting like mad, screaming "at last, some good fonts for linux!", whereas, as far as I remember, these fonts lacks many many scripts, starting with the simpliest ones like Cyrillic. I don't even want to mention double-width characters. The same with some GPL'ed fonts release newly (don't remember the name, something starting with a 'd') - nothing except latin1. Same with otherwise excellent Knoppix-CD (OK, it's not a Debian release, but a good example of not caring about i18n and l10n): if you start it with the Russian interface, the fonts are plain ugly - nothing was made to ensure anti-aliasing for example.
What I think about is some regulated way to care about the needs of international debian users. Let's take an example: some programmîplays badly along with UTF-8 and therefore can't be properly used by me, as I need e.g. both German and Russian. I can as well file a bug against it, but it wouldn't matter much, as the maintainer would just say 'it's not supported upstream' and nothing would happen. Other situation would arise, if something like interoperability in different language environments had been (I'm just speculating) a part of Debian Policy. In that case, package at least could have been marked as 'non-functioning under non-latin circumstances' and this could possibly lead to exclusion from Debian, or separating it into a diffenrent part of debian (like non-US is) etc. This way, a possible user could be warned in advance and maybe lead to the break-through for Unicode. Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. -- Nikolai Prokoschenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] / Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
