Re: gettext-0.10.36 Japanese PO file

[Paul Eggert]

> From: Bruno Haible <address@hidden>
> Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 00:20:50 +0200 (CEST)
> 
> there is no technical reason to convert it to EUC-JP, now that
> glibc-2.2 and libintl can convert on the fly.

There are still some technical reasons, though they are not as strong
as they used to be.

For example, GNU grep doesn't yet handle multibyte input correctly,
and it is often useful to apply grep to all the files in a
distribution, including .po files.  And even once grep is fixed,
people may be using older versions of GNU grep, or may use other tools
that aren't yet fully multibyte-aware.  So, for quite some time
(perhaps an annoyingly long time, if you're trying to get people to
upgrade their software :-) it will still be useful to convert from
Shift_JIS to a safer encoding like EUC-JP, as this avoids common
glitches when the text is analyzed by non-multibyte-aware tools.

Of course in the end the choice of encoding is the Japanese
translation team's decision, but I for one am glad that they didn't
choose Shift_JIS....