Re: usability

[Yoshinori K. Okuji]

About internationalization:

GRUB 2 has a goal of internationalization. Here, i18n means these things 
(in my definition):

- Messages can be translated

- Non-ASCII characters can be used in config files

- Non-ASCII characters can be displayed

- Non-ASCII characters can be used in file names

The last one might not be important, because you don't use non-ASCII in 
OS image files normally (consider /boot/vmlinuz). But I think 
filesystems should be able to list up file names with non-ASCII 
characters at least, so that the user can see some useful information 
on the screen when she types "ls".

The first one should be realized in the same way as gettext, but it is 
not implemented yet.

The third is possible in my test environment. I tested it with Japanese, 
and worked fine.


When you want i18n, you need to define something about character code 
and encodings. For now, I select Unicode as the standard character code 
and use UTF-8 and UCS-4 as the encodings. I think this is a good idea, 
because Unicode makes things a bit simpler than mixing a lot of code 
(like ISO2022-JP-2). UTF-8 is used in most places, because it has a 
good compatibility with ASCII. UCS-4 is used only in the console stuff 
at the moment. This makes the implementation of a console device 
easier, because you can represent each character in a fixed size (this 
is not completely true, because of ligatures).

Therefore, you must assume that UTF-8 is used when you use strings in 
your code. And, you must not assume that the length of a string is 
equal to the size of the string on the screen. For example, many 
European characters are 2-byte in UTF-8, but they are shown as 1-column 
characters on the screen. So you must distinguish between the length 
and the column size carefully.

In reality, what does the user want to do? I guess she wants to do 
these:

- See messages in her own language

- See titles in the menu in her own language

- Write comments in config files in her own languages

So I'd like to assume that config files are written in UTF-8. Maybe we 
can support other encodings, but this requires some heuristic methods 
or an explicit declaration of an used encoding. I feel that this is too 
much, since people normally do not use UCS-2 or UTF-7 in text files. 
But some people may want to use "legacy" chracter code, such as 
ISO-8859-1 and EUC-JP.

I'm not sure if it is better to translate error messages from commands. 
This should be a bad idea from developers' point of view, but useful 
for ordinary users. More thoughts are needed.

Do you have any idea or question?

Okuji