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

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

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).

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

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

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

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

* printing messages correctly 

> -- 
> Ettore
> 

 Best regards,
  -Vlad