Re: Thinking about Dogfood

[Kjartan Maraas <kmaraas online no>]

Den 13 Aug 2001 14:39:31 +0500, skrev Vlad Harchev:
> 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

I think this is a bit unfair. I've been using evolution (although using
iso8859-1) for a long time and I've certainly helped fix a _lot_ of buge
wrt i18n/l10n. I think the developers have been very responsive to all
problems I've reported to them.

> - 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

http://bugzilla.ximian.com/

I see you filed a few bug reports. You may want to file more to get
things fixed. ;)

> 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

How is it broken for German?

> 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.
> 

Excuse my french but this is bollocks.

>  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!
> 

I think the main problem is a lack of quality bugreports. The developers
seem to be capable of solving what problems are reported to them. If
they turn out not to, you can give them a hand, right? :)

>  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...
> 

We will never give up! Seriously, I think the current state of affairs
is pretty good. Try out a new snapshot - you might be surprised.

Cheers
Kjartan