Re: Thinking about Dogfood

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On 13 Aug 2001, Miguel de Icaza wrote:

 Hi, 

 I think that for Gnome there are clear reasons why Gnome doesn't spread
widely any more.
 Majority of gnome software is just unusable for non-english people (for
people who don't use ascii - i.e. who need accented characters, or even worse
- for people who have to use non-latin languages - cyrillic and greek scripts,
and Chineese-Japaneese-Korean). I repeat - majority of software is broken for
non-ascii users. Even Evolution is broken for people who have to use non-ascii
(e.g. German people)! The i18n-related bugs in Evolution make me thinking that
Evolution developers even *do not test* it with accented characters! I wonder
where Sun (who seems to care about i18n in thier Solaris) and HP and other
Ximian's inverstors are looking at - it seems Ximian was supposed to polish
gnome for international use too - but Ximian is not doing this at all.

 Being at usable for international users is VERY important for any software
that targets at "world domination" or "becoming a de facto standard" - since
it gets 'viable as a standard' stamp and begings to be considered seriously
all over the world by various parties (including government). Currently KDE
applications are much more usable for international users!

 So guys - please pay more attention to i18n! Hire really qualified i18n
engineers!

 Alternatively, give up developing gnome since it will be just a loss of
efforts. But it's a pity to see a project with rather clean architecture to
die due to the way it was implemented...

 Best regards,
  -Vlad

To moderator: this is the 3rd copy of this message - previous two were held
for approval since they had 'implicit destination' (since they were cc'd to
Aaron and Miguel). Please kill those 2 messages. Note: list manager software
archives unapproved messages too for some reason! So sorry for 2 extra copies
of this message in archives.

> 
> > Someone wrote in to us recently and suggested that "If you want GNOME to
> > be really usable, force all the programmers to stop using a shell, and
> > watch them hack it until it is."
> 
> Tuomas reported recently that he was able to do a complete
> installation of Linux and Ximian GNOME without using a terminal.
> 
> There are still areas where this could improve, and I would love to
> have a few days of `No terminals for me' just to try to find out what
> kinds of things I am missing.
> 
> Tuomas tried this for a few days, and he did submit a few bug reports
> to maintainers on things they could do to improve their applications.
> 
> Maybe we can collect a `top 10 reasons to use a shell' and try to
> address those?
> 
> miguel.
> 
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