The following reply was made to PR bin/34048; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Christian Biere <christianbiere@gmx.de>
To: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Cc: 
Subject: Re: bin/34048 (Flaws in German sysinst messages)
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2006 15:47:28 +0200

 David Laight wrote:
 >  On Sat, Sep 30, 2006 at 12:55:02PM +0000, Christian Biere wrote:
 >  >  OT: Why are there two spaces after a period?
   
 >  It used to be a standard practise when using a typewriter.
 
 Ok, I see but I've just read that this is an US-American rule and
 was not used in German(y). I don't know what British, Canadians or
 Australians think about this. Anyway, removing those is part of a
 "good" translation. A related case is the use of spaces before
 question marks in French which is considered "plenken" (roughly
 "blanking") and bad practice by German speakers respectively
 typers.
 
 Also isn't this "double blank rule" tied to typewriter specifics?
 Weren't spaces only half as wide as a normal character on those? I
 suspect good typewriters adjusted the feed individually to each
 character anyway. I just checked. The one I used didn't which looks
 cheap by nowadays standards.
 
 With a fixed width font - which should be the usual case for
 sysinst and is common for terminal displays - those double blanks
 look unnatural wide to me.
 
 By the way, formally you have to use spaces after dots in
 abbreviations in German: "z. B." (English: "e.g.") or "u. s. w."
 (English: "and so on" or etc.). In my opinion, this should be
 ignored for fixed-width font displays. Actually, this is ignored
 in many printed texts as well.
 
 -- 
 Christian