Re: report on [bad] status of i18n of gnome apps - somebody should explicitly care about it

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

a few notes...

On 24 Mar 2001 17:18:13 +0400, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> 
> On 24 Mar 2001, Ettore Perazzoli wrote:
> 
> > >   I think no more than 1.5 month of work needed for fixing 90% of all software
> > > and libraries shipped with fifth toe and gnome (evolution not included, fixing
> > > it will require almost 2 weeks IMO). 
> > 
> >   What are you basing this estimate on?
> 
>  I18n-friendliness of mailer requires considerable efforts. It's reallistical
> to code everything needed in 7 days (worst case estimation) with very little
> testing, and dedicate a week to testing all i18n aspects - that's why I
> estimated it as 2 weeks.
>  
> >   We are doing our best to make Evolution fully I18N-aware (eg. we are
> > using UTF-8 all over the place, and we have EFont to deal with the font
> > issues).  Any feedback on what should be improved to make our I18N
> > support better would be truly appreciated, as we do want to make
> > non-latin-1 users happy before 1.0 gets shipped.
> 
>  Thank you for your intents. Yes, utf8 can be considered a requisite for i18n,
> but it's not all that is needed. Here is a list of what is needed:
> 
> * charset in which messages are sent and transfer encoding in which mails are
>   sent has to be configurable by user (sending everything in utf8 is not
>   sufficient since there are email to pager gateways that are stupid, and
>   pagers don't like utf8), and utf8 is not always good idea due to size of
>   resultant representation (it's better to try to send messages in single-byte
>   charset).

Camel does this, it chooses the best charset for each mime part.

> 
> * Properly setting charset name in header and for each attachment of
>   text/plain type, properly encode body per settings

again, we do this too.

> 
> * recoding the bodies/attachments and subjects of messages received to the
>  internal representation of MUA (utf8 in case of Evo).

yup, do this.

> 
> * properly dealing with charsets of any other data Evo deals with (calendar
>   and contacts)

can't speak for the calendar and addressbook, but I think they do.

> 
> * when uploading mails to pilots etc message bodies and subjects have to be
>   recoded in the form Pilots expects (I didn't check this).

we don't yet sync mail with palms, but if/when we will (probably won't
happen until after 1.0?)

> 
> * printing messages correctly 

I can't say for certain that we do this, but I believe that we do.

Jeff

PS: If you know of instances where I am wrong about the mailer, please
let ettore or I know so that I can fix them.

I only know of one place that is/might be broken, and that is in the
SASL code (I should bugzilla this...)
Actually, this is most likely broken.