Re: Thinking about Dogfood

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2001 at 02:39:31PM +0500 or thereabouts, Vlad Harchev wrote:
>  I think that for Gnome there are clear reasons why Gnome doesn't spread
> widely any more.
>  Majority of gnome software is just unusable for non-english people (for
> people who don't use ascii - i.e. who need accented characters, or even 
> worse - for people who have to use non-latin languages - cyrillic and 
> greek scripts, and Chineese-Japaneese-Korean). I repeat - majority of 
> software is broken for non-ascii users. 

It's worse than that. I finally got my locale as en_GB, and I keep
finding weirdnesses. And that's really not -that- different from the
default locale :) 

>  So guys - please pay more attention to i18n! Hire really qualified i18n
> engineers!
> 
>  Alternatively, give up developing gnome since it will be just a loss of
> efforts. But it's a pity to see a project with rather clean architecture 
> to die due to the way it was implemented...

Perhaps it would help if someone wrote up "how to make your application
easily internationalisable". I don't see a lot in gnome-docu/white-papers/
on that. 

Some pages which address parts of this: 

	Internationalization guidelines (request for comments)
	http://www.advogato.org/article/42.html

	I18N or die!
        http://www.gnome.gr.jp/~nakai/i18n/

	Writing for localisation
	http://developer.gnome.org/documents/style-guide/chapter-1.html

	GUADEC II: Preparing for Translation
	http://www.linux.org.uk/~telsa/Trips/Talks/guadecii-translations.html

The first covers all sorts of stuff; the second tells you how to
set up your machine so that you can at least test apps in a Japanese
locale don't break on start-up; and the third is specifically about 
making documents easy to translate. (You will note that the preceding
sentence breaks most of the rules in the third page.) The fourth was
a talk at GUADEC and is about using the gettext and friends tools. 

None of them really address the "in this locale, I get stupid strings
in menus/clocks/something" bugs that crop up. All too often, it seems 
this gets reported against one applet, fixed in that applet, and then
not fixed in all the other applets which also exhibit it. Unless
someone goes on a crusade to find every other occurrence of the same
bug. 

Telsa