Re: [gnome-cyr] [Bug 58785] Changed - Wrong display of Nonascii in bookmarks imported from Mozilla

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On 12 Aug 2001, Yanko Kaneti wrote:

 Hello, 

> 
> On 11 Aug 2001 11:44:36 +0500, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> >  We are just got used to the extremely low quality of and motivation to
> > support for non-ascii in free programs. 
> 
> i would like to add to that " and we as people actively interested in
> i18n have got used to do very little to help ourselves"

 Probably because a lot of software is broken by design from i18n (and other)
POVs, and only complete rewrite can fix it. Or because of developers rejecting
i18n-related patches.. Or may be because not everybody has a well-paid job to
spen numerous hours hacking free software "for free".
 
> > At least I think that developers who
> > can't think properly when they are programming (moreover, not in their free
> > time, but as a full-time Ximian employee) deserve such (and even stricter)
> > attitude from our side. People can't be *that* optimistic to have better
> > attitude to such developers.
> 
> i cant agree with the assumption that anyone from the ximian team (or
> anybody else that writes free software) owes something to the i18n
> effort just because they are paid for what they do. i'm almost certain

 Evo overall was designed to be i18n-friendly - otherwise why all mucking with
utf8 as internal representation? So Ximian's programmers don't produce good
code, so our attitude to them is well justified.
 My recent bugreports to Evo make me thinking that Evo developers even didn't
test a single time who evo works with accented characters (latin1) - they bugs
are so easy-to-find (broken accout name, broken name in From: field)..

> that the actual paying people often dont care that much about i18n, so
> i'd rather thank all evo developers (and all free software developers)
> when they do something that helps i18n.

 No doubt Sun and HP and others who invested in Ximian are expecting from them
software that works not only for ascii (at least Solaris8 tries to support a
lot of locales), but for me Ximian breaks their expectations horribly. In
fact, I feel very sorry about Sun. Ximian *are paid* (using investments) to
produce good software (that works not only for ascii), but they fail to do so.
I don't think that we should be very thankfull to people who are paid
(and paid very well from some POVs!) for their job and who do their job
properly. 

> >  I only can feel shame for members of this list for not submitting bugreports
> > in time - but they seem to do their best at bugreporting.
> 
> yes i am fully aware they do, yet i dont see a reason for them to be
> frustrated and vent on a public mailing list, and i clearly feel a
> little asshamed when i do only bugreporting,  especially on i18n matters

 You have a very good position to bugreporting. Please keep it up. I had such
position to bugreporting 1 year ago BTW. I have fixed all software I
use personally, and I don't have time to fix software I don't use, and 'fix
yourself' attiture is very suboptimial - while for stranger it will take 1
hour to inspect and try to fix the problem, it will take 5 minutes from mature
developer of the software. From this POV just bugreporting is not that bad.

> > PS: I adviced XImian to hire me to rule out all i18n-related questions at
> > Spring several times, publically on gnome-hackers and privately, and I said
> > that I will be able to do all the work in a month. They didn't consider it at
> > all. They definitely don't care about i18n - they care about en_US locale
> > only.
> 
> having the money and caring dont come together as often as we would
> like, and its bad to generalize and assume developers attitude from the
> attitude of the business department

 It seems Ximian doesn't have business department we are used to AFAIK -
Miguel and  Nat are business department.
 Anyway, developer's attitute to i18n is very clear - they also just don't
care. Majority of i18n-related bugs can be fixed by 5-line patches - but
developers do not try to fix them at all. And as I said, nobody of developers
have tested evo with nonascii (or tried to fix trivial bugs that were
discovered by such testing).

 Best regards,
  -Vlad