[ On Sunday, September 8, 2002 at 16:48:01 (+0900), itojun@iijlab.net wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: finger 
>
> 	you don't seem to understand issues with protocol multilingualization.
> 	why do we need "charset" in MIME content-type?  this is because we need
> 	peers to agree, or at least understand, encoding usable for each other.
> 	same goes for fingerd and finger.

With finger and fingerd it is not quite that complex.  I think you're
blowing this issue well out of its reasonable proportions.

The majority of the time people use finger is with other local users who
are 99.9% of the time likely to have created their ~/.plan files (or
whatever else fingerd might send) using the same locale as the recipient.

Futhermore with finger to some remote site it's trivial for the user to
adjust whatever parameters they need to adjust in order to see the
result, and if they don't then only the locally printable octets will be
sent to their terminal.  This is not a big problem -- there's no
interoperability issue other than behind the finger user's eyes.

This is no different an issue than with WHOIS, where already WHOIS
servers around the world send data formatted for their own locales and
let the client users deal with interpreting it.  (of course sometimes
there's a query option to ask the WHOIS server to send responses in a
given language, but that's an optional and striclty unnecessary
"feature")

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>