Re: non-utf8 po files breaking the build

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

tis 2002-12-03 klockan 00.42 skrev Keld Jørn Simonsen:
> > > > > I really dont understand your rhetorics here. We have decided not to
> > > > > force UTF-8 on our translators a number of times, and then you again and
> > > > > again claim the opposite. Please accept that we live in a world that
> > > > > has multiple charsets, and please do not make it harder for translators
> > > > > to contribute to Gnome.
> > > > 
> > > > We are not forcing UTF-8 on anyone. The only thing that has been decided
> > > > is that all po files should be in UTF-8 format *in* *CVS* so that we
> > > > have less problems for the people trying to make tarballs once a week
> > > > and also for the people who are trying to keep the tree buildable at all
> > > > times.
> > > 
> > > Well, we have decided to keep the po files in the CVS in all charsets, two times.
> > > We have never decided to only have it in UTF-8.
> > 
> > Please re-read this very thread then. I thought we have already made it
> > pretty clear that we have decided on keeping all GNOME 2.x translations
> > in UTF-8 in CVS. How more official do you want the decision?
> 
> I reread some messages. I actually thought that we decided some 4 months
> ago to keep the multi-charset way of doing things.

That may have been the case four months ago, although I'm not convinced
we actually decided to do something at that time, but rather leave the
issue where it was and decide something later. In any case, it doesn't
matter, as things are decided now. More on that below.


> But I could not
> really find any definitive statements. I remember the recent discussion,
> but then only you and Yanko being all for it, and Kjartan proposing
> that we make some way to let translators deliver .po-files in cvs
> in the charset of their choice. 

Part of the purpose of the latest messages in the most recent thread was
to make it explicitly clear that we have decided to keep GNOME 2 po
files in UTF-8 in cvs, so that we wouldn't need to have this discussion
over and over, and some people always claiming things aren't decided. It
seems we failed to make this clear to everyone.

You should have a look at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2002-November/msg00201.html : 
"The only thing that has been decided
is that all po files should be in UTF-8 format *in* *CVS* so that we
have less problems for the people trying to make tarballs once a week
and also for the people who are trying to keep the tree buildable at all
times."

If you read Kjartan's and my responses and many else's, it should come
as no surprise that there is a large consensus here.

It should also become clear that things are actually decided. I don't
like having to point this out, but Kjartan is the GTP coordinator and
has been so for quite some time. Kjartan and me are GTP contact persons.

> > Please remember that things like this don't get decided by popular vote,
> > and the decisions certainly don't get invalidated by one persons
> > reluctant protests on having to commit things in UTF-8, no matter how
> > loud the complaints/rants may be.
> 
> Oh well, but just having two loud ranting persons advocating UTF-8
> should not make a decision either:-)

Sometimes it depends on who those people are (also, there wasn't only
two people advocating UTF-8). We certainly don't want a situation where
things are decided by only a copuple of people, but we don't want a
situation where nothing gets decided and we can't move forward either.
That's why the projects have coordinators, and lately also contact
persons. That's why decisions can be made like for example in the GDP,
where they decided to move from SGML for all GNOME documentation to
Docbook XML. It may have been an impopular decision for some, but there
was a consensus that this was the right direction and it was eventually
decided.
That's why there are coordinators -- to represent the individual GNOME
subprojects. That means that there has to be some decisions in order to
represent the subproject as a whole, and to work with the same goals.


> I proposed a way that could accomodate everybody, I think,
> namely to extract and convert to utf-8 when you need the po-files,
> eg for statistics. I ahve not seen any comments on that.

You come with paper solutions; "maybe it can be done this way", "maybe
files can be automatically recoded", etc. I haven't seen any concrete
bug fix yet. Remember that code speaks more than words, and we haven't
seen any code yet from you to fix the current GNOME 2 i18n
infrastructure to work with multiple encodings.

In any case, the use of UTF-8 for GNOME 2 po files in CVS has been
decided. Please refrain from more mails claiming the opposite.


Thanks,
Christian