Re: Persian translations

[Ramanan Selvaratnam <rama uklinux net>]

On Mon, 2003-12-01 at 13:54, Pablo Saratxaga wrote:

[ to seem to attmpt a lecture at another experinced FS developer is not
an easy task but I have to say what is in mind I guess :-)]


> [Tamil]

IMHO the issues of faced by Tamil too, simply cannot be evaluvated on
technical levels alone.

> > A related example. Recently the ta tree was discovered to be infected
> > with non UTF-8 strings. It was never documented so basically ended up
> > wasting many people's enthusiasm and broke the flow of the l10n effort
> > until discovered through painful analysis. 
> 
> Well, in the case of Tamil it is due to historic reasons (proper utf-8 support
> is only recent, while using tscii (well, not real tscii, but tscii in disguise,
> claiming it is cp1252)

True. I would like to hear all this many times more actually.
But the issue I was pointing out with the example is not the technical
aspect instead the human aspect.
To be precise the lack of adoption of time tested free software
methodologies.
IMO this in turn came about due to lack of respect to FS among those
enthusiastic for Tamil IT directions even in the FS sphere.

In my case I like to think my enthusiasm is for FS is first. I very well
know that FS is the best way for Tamils (actually world) so it is not a
question of I like Tamil second or similar. 

Do you see, I am not writing about any technical issue at all instead
the attitudes.

Instead highlighting the fact that people do not realise the power of
the finely tuned existing FS infrastructure and just go for it.

> Now that utf-8 for tamil works quite well all those problems will hopefully
> be a thing of the past.

This gives a good opportunity to illustrate my point about people's
attitude -- No your hope is not being fullfilled.

It is very clear now that few years have rolled by since Unicode is
adopted by the Microsoft paltform... due to the widespread nature of
Win98 (hardware limits) and its inability to support UTF-8, we have
quite a lot of people just hanging about the FS development front
hoarding another encoding scheme, IM layout etc.
As IT adoption goes many believe the words of the known 'brands' than
the voices of reason in the ensuing confusions.
So we have this heavily forked community where any talk of software
freedoms is becoming a laughing matter. 

And believe me FS sounds correct and continues to attract the right type
of people who would be interested in new technologies it even seems like
a good idea to start all over from scratch at times.
So it is not doom and gloom. Just another long point that forking
efforts is bad from another perspective.
(and I have not even touched upon the history  of Tamil diaspora ... we
are doing great for that as we maintain one unified branch :-)
 
Best wishes,

Ramanan