Re: [PATCH 0/4] quotearg improvements

[Bruno Haible]

Hi Karl,

>     >     In non-Unicode locales, the left-pointing
>     >     grave accent is replaced by the closing quote.  
>     > 
>     > I am very fond of my ` characters and hate the fact that stupid
>     > standards broke what was the obviously useful thing to do ...
>     
>     I don't know what you consider to be the "obviously useful thing".
>     I find Markus Kuhn's write-ups at
>       http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/apostrophe.html
>       http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/quotes.html
>     very convincing.
> 
> I find the tone quite high-handed.  But never mind.  I don't want to
> debate Markus' web pages, it's not germane.

Markus' web pages are not unrelated to this issue, they explain how the
problem with the old `...' habit arose, and they explain the first steps of
the solution. Paolo's patch is one of the last steps of the solution.

When the issue was discussed in 2000-2001, of course I was aware of the
"quotes problem", but no one knew where the problem came from. When Markus
Kuhn explained to us that we X11 users had this problem because the X11
fonts had not been updated to match international standards newer than
US-ASCII:1968, I found this very enlightening.

Obviously he also managed to convince the heads of the XFree86 project,
who accepted his change of the XFree86 raster fonts.

Why do you call this high-handed or arrogant? I'm merely pointing to the
well-written technical arguments that the expert in the field has carefully
written up.

Bruno