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Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 2/4] qjson: do not save/restore contexts


From: Laszlo Ersek
Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 2/4] qjson: do not save/restore contexts
Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2015 11:50:54 +0100
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:38.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/38.3.0

On 11/24/15 09:03, Gerd Hoffmann wrote:
>   Hi,
> 
>> Is it accepted practice to put UTF-8 in commit messages? (Or, actually,
>> anywhere in patches, except maybe the notes section?)
> 
> Sure.  We don't want limit people names (in signed-off etc) to us-ascii.
> 
> See "eb8934b vnc: fix memory corruption (CVE-2015-5225)" for a name
> written in kanji.

I'm very sorry, but this is something I expressly disagree with. (I
didn't want to bring this up on my own, but since you did...)

International engineering / science / research etc. are being done in
English. We use English because we expect people to learn one common
language (native English speakers have it easy, but that's a side
point), so that everyone not have to learn every possible language.

The same point applies *much more* to writing systems / alphabets. You
(the generic you) can't expect me (the generic me) to read Kanji,
Sanskrit, Thai script, Cyrillic script, and so on, even if your name is
written in that language natively. You come up with an approximation in
Latin script, and use that.

Is your purpose to feel pleased about the faithful representation of
your name in the commit message (that the international community is
unable to read, not even approximately), or is your goal to allow the
community to read your (approximate) name?

I bet everyone who is involved in international development, and travels
occasionally, has business cards in Latin script *too*. I bet whoever
does research and publishes papers in English puts their name (or at
least an official approximation of it) on the front page in  Latin
script *too*.

Specifically about the commit you mention, the email of the reporter is:

  address@hidden

I'm absolutely sure that "zuozhi" is the official Pinyin transliteration
of the reporter's name (or a part of it). Now, while Pinyin has its own
separate pronunciation rules, I *can* (and occasionally do) look up
those rules. So Pinyin allows me to *work* with the name with relative
safety, and it even gives me a fleeting chance at getting the
pronunciation right, should we meet.

My name is László Érsek. I've dropped the accents for the purpose of
international exchange in advance; I just write Laszlo Ersek, even when
I sign physical documents that are in English.

Even that way, I've seen the larger community abuse my name endlessly;
in particular I've seen all permutations (= reordering) and variations
(= missing characters) of the substring "szl" in "Laszlo".

If the larger community fails to get such a simple ASCII name right --
and yes I'm at fault too, I have occasionally left off the second "n" of
your last name --, then why am I (or anyone else) expected to struggle
with names written in non-Latin script? They are much harder, and have
exactly zero value, as far as international collaboration is concerned.

The development is being done in English, and the script of English is
Latin. Stick with it.

>> I'd recommend o_O.
> 
> Heh, it's 2015, not 1995 ...

Sure, and the Internet Standards are still being written in pure ASCII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Request_for_Comments#Obtaining_RFCs

Laszlo




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