Re: Thinking about Dogfood

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On 13 Aug 2001, Kjartan Maraas wrote:

> 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?

http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6621  :)

[...]
> 
> >  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

 Yes, members of gnome-cyr gnome org are trying to submit as much bugreports
as possible. And also I remember that a list of i18n-related problems in
Evolution were presented to developers in March (inability to select charset
of the message when viewing particular email, inability to support headers
with chars with 8th bit set in them and inability to select charset of the
outgoing messages (yes, not a most important one, was fixed) and a lot of
cosmetic but very important for usability ones - like
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6724 and
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=6725 - were both pointed out in
March).

 Yes, developers seem to be capable, but it seems they are not that
motivated.

> they turn out not to, you can give them a hand, right? :)

 I would love to if I was hired by Ximian.

> >  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.

 You are happy user of latin1 - and state of affairs can seem pretty good from
your POV. Ask any Japanese or greek or russian person and you'll be told that
they've already migrated to KDE due to extremely weak support of i18n in gnome
programs.

 Best regards,
  -Vlad