Re: Evolution and support for rtl languages

[Christian Rose <menthos gnome org>]

fre 2004-04-23 klockan 21.15 skrev Arafat Medini:
> > > Hopefully it will get fixed, but here comes the second point (or more
> > > the POINT...) if I ask for it to get fixed and I get the answer that it
> > > will not, at least not in the coming 4 to 5 years (maybe I understood
> > > something wrong as they didn't directly say : "we will fix it after 5
> > > years...") But if you feel something like that you simply panic. Well at
> > > least I panic.
> > 
> > Really important things do get fixed because anyone can fix them. Nobody
> > has the power to force anybody to work on anything unless they are
> > paying them. You might find that inconvenient but it's still true.
>
> I was never against what you are saying or what others think. Still this
> will not help me or that big portion of ppl outa there...
> It's not about forcing, you can't force OSS work it's about getting it
> in ppls mind, and making them "feel" the importance of work on that
> topic.

Exactly, that's why I suggested to bring it up on more suitable lists
for this purpose. You're essentially just preaching to those already
convinced here. ;-)

What I would do in your case, would be to bring this up on
desktop-devel-list and evolution-hackers, and carefully explain in a
detailed and non-blaming way¹ what the problems are and also why it is
important to get such bugs fixed. I'd also explain in a polite manner¹
that currently Evolution doesn't meet the high standards in this area
that the rest of GNOME fulfill, and so that it would probably be good if
this could be fixed in Evo before or shortly after Evo becomes part of
GNOME.
As Murray pointed out, Evo probably won't be left out of GNOME just
because of this issue, since a lot of people want it in and have worked
hard in other areas of Evo to make it live up to other GNOME standards
and integrate well, and Evo was initially already proposed for GNOME
2.6, so a lot of people are desperately waiting for it to get in. But
that doesn't mean that you couldn't point out that this needs fixing
soon, and will look weird and below the usual quality of GNOME. I can't
say these things for you though, I know close to nothing about RTL
issues in general and what issues there currently are in Evo, so you do
need to say this yourself on those lists.

Also everything what Murray says about not being able to force anyone to
work on something is of course true, but that doesn't mean that one
cannot be successful by helping developers to you. I think you could be
successful that way in this case. To me, not being an expert on RTL
issues, the above bug report in Bugzilla looks very short on details. It
basically says "a lot of things are broken in the Evo UI with regards to
RTL" but is short on details on exactly what those things are. I didn't
get much wiser myself by reading that report. Also, an attached
screenshot can be helpful but only if it's clear what specific problem
it is supposed to be showing.

Something developers like very much is seperate issues being reported
seperately in Bugzilla. That way they can resolve the issues one by one
and mark the individual reports solved one by one, instead of looking at
one gigantic and confusing report that tries to cover all problems, and
try to figure out what problems are already fixed and which still need
fixing from that  report. Developers and other contributors are often
also looking for easy bugs to fix; by doing multiple detailed and
specific bug reports about seperate and specific problems, many people
can solve the problems in parallell, and often they won't be that
difficult to solve if they're specific enough and only describe one
smaller problem.

So what I would do in your case would to be split up the initial report
above into smaller ones, by first doing some new reports (and perhaps
later adding a comment  to the initial report saying something like
"This report was split up. For the problem about XYZ see bug 12345, for
the problem about ABC see bug 12346" and so on).
In the new reports, try to only focus on one specific problem in every
report, for example a specific toolbar being rendered wrongly. Try to
explain the problem in detail in the bug report text, explaining what is
currently wrong with the toolbar and what it should be like instead.
Perhaps attach a small screenshot showing only the toolbar in this case,
or draw some arrows on the screenshot that points out the problematic
area before attaching the screenshot. That way, it will be easy to see
from the screenshot what is being rendered wrongly and what the bug
report text describes.

If there are other issues, such as tree views, other widgets or other
areas in the interface that are being rendered wrongly with regards to
RTL, put those in other, seperate bug reports.

This may sound like a lot of work when reporting, and sure it is some
more work. But the difference is that when things are reported in
specific, detailed reports this way they are *so* much more likely to
get fixed. Often the process of getting a problem fixed is by meeting
halfways: for the bug reporter to describe the problems specific and
detailed enough so that the developer knows what to fix.

I can't do this for you though -- you or someone else that knows about
and can describe the current RTL problems in Evo needs to do this.

More details about good bug reporting practice can be read at
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/good-bugs.html.


Christian



¹ Obviously I myself often fail in this area, but hopefully others can
do much better.