[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#2954) gettext, msgids, and ascii

["Jason Short via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In a discussion with Per recently he asked if it was possible to use 
non-ascii (for instance, UTF-8) characters in a msgid (a translatable 
string).  I asked: why would you ever want to?

Eventually we concluded we simply don't know.

However, we now have that problem.  Running msgmerge in po/ gives 
messages like:

   msgmerge: warning: The following msgid contains non-ASCII characters

   The founding of the Danish kingdom is generally assigned to the reign
   of Harald Blåtand, who unified what is now Denmark between 958 and
   988. et:

   This will cause problems to translators who use a character encoding
   different from yours. Consider using a pure ASCII msgid instead.

in other words, the legends are not pure ascii - they are latin1 just 
like the city and leader names.  But they are translated.

I still don't know if this gives gettext any problems, but the above 
message certainly indicates so.  Of course, perhaps they just mean that 
if the message ISN'T translated it will show up in latin1 instead of in 
the local encoding...which means, for instance, people using UTF-8 will 
not see it properly.  We already know this.

I suggest we wait and see if anyone actually has problems with it.  If 
so, we will need to make it ascii.  We can still get the accented 
characters by introducing an "english" translation of the text.

jason