Re: New team for Iranian Azerbaijani (az_IR)

[danilo gnome org (Danilo Åegan)]

Hi Roozbeh,

Today at 14:38, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-09-08 at 16:38, Danilo Åegan wrote:
>> Today at 13:01, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
>> 
>> > I believe that the translations for "az" should be separated into az_AZ
>> > and az_IR. I can't recommend a default "az"... [snip]
>> 
>> What about compatibility issues?  Can anyone estimate the effect
>> changing az to az_AZ would have on existing "az" users?
>
> I don't know about the possible compatibility issues. Would you mention
> a few practical cases?

For example, if someone was already using locale (imaginary, I don't
know if it exists) az_RU, with our translations being "az", he'd get
to see them.  If they're suddently switched to az_AZ, such users
would see untranslated messages.  

This is purely speculative, of course, since I don't know in what
ways is Azerbaijani used throughout the world.  That's why I asked
you for the potential issues.

OTOH, Metin doesn't seem too fond of the idea of renaming all the
files for the locale, and I don't see a good reason to do this now,
unless we go for it for all the locales.

> We should be general when a team is started (Iranian Persian is readable
> to Afghan speakers, so we only have one "fa" team for now) but fix
> mistakes later (current Persian files should be renamed to "fa_IR" and a
> new "fa_AF" created when volunteers are found and the vocabulary is
> proved to be non-unifiable).

Yeah, "we should", but it doesn't seem we are.  After all, we have
Spanish as "es", Portuguese as "pt", French as "fr", etc.  Yes, these
are slightly different from "az" case, since they at least use the
same script, and are probably *at least a bit* comprehensible to
everyone expecting those languages.

Still, we cannot expect all of us to be language experts for all
languages in the world, so perhaps first-come-first-served basis is
good enough here (at least it's non-discriminative: "we don't know if 
it's best choice, but since no one has asked for it before, you may
have it").

Of course, if we had sufficient input on this when "az" team was
*started*, perhaps we should have acted differently.  Alas, we didn't,
so I see no reason in forcing a switch now (anymore than we're going
to force "pt" to become "pt_PT", or "fr" to become "fr_FR").


Note that these are only my personal opinions, not in any way
representable of what GTP is going to do, since GTP does what we *all*
want it to do :-)

Cheers,
Danilo