Re: [TLS] Genart last call review of draft-ietf-tls-tls13-24

[Peter Gutmann <[e-mail]>]

I can't believe the amount of pointless bikeshedding that's already been done
over something that's going to be a rarely-if-ever used mechanism for one set
of hardcore technical developers to communicate to another set of hardcore
technical developers.  This isn't a design for a multilingual IM system with
emojis and animated GIFs, it's a rarely-used debugging/diagnostic facility,
and yet we're arguing over whether a developer who can read a lengthy
technical document specified entirely in US-ASCII (TLS RFC) and implement it
in C or Java (US-ASCII, English keywords) will be unable to communicate an
error message in anything but Cantonese (or Mandarin, or Qiang, or Kam–Sui, or
Kipchak, or whatever was meant by "Chinese").

Even for the few steps in the process where there's i18n available like the
gcc compile stage, the Chinese-speaking devs I know use the English version
because they don't want an attempted guess in another language at what the
error is, they want the actual error message from the compiler authors (many
gcc error messages are barely comprehensible in English, let alone in an
Uighur translation.  Or maybe there are in Uighur, which is why I have trouble
figuring out what they're saying).

In any case it's a rarely-used, optional, by-special-request debugging
facility for technical developers, make it UTF-8 and the devs can decide what
they put in there.

Peter.