Re: Thinking about Dogfood

[Gediminas Paulauskas <menesis delfi lt>]

kažkada, berods Pr, 2001-08-13 14:59+0500, Vlad Harchev rašė:
>  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.

If you can't configure YOUR system, this doesn't mean that software is
broken.
Many users have no problems in using GNOME in their environments. I doubt
that translators are translating stuff blindly -- their should be using software
they translate. Guess why there are even Chinese and Korean translations?

I have ONE problem in using Evolution. Actually there are more, but they are
so simple I can (and some time ago did) fix them. Zbygniew and Kjartan also
fixed much of them.

Also, I have only one problem with Gtk+ fonts. And I am using iso-8859-13
with accented chars. THis charset is one of least supported ones.

>  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!

Every KDE user in Lithuania has problems with setting up keyboard. GNOME
users don't because it uses standard X way. Also there are less problems
with fonts because of a strange way they are set up. So don't say KDE is
more suitable for international users.

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

I understand this whole rant is just because Ximian does not hire you to
work on i18n. If you want to be hired, work a lot, file lots of bug reports
and fix lots of them. When they see you are THE person that can fix every
i18n issue, maybe they hire you.

But you just rant in mails "GNOME is bad because I don't get paid to work on
it".

Wake up, it is free software.

>  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...

File bug reports. But I guess you should ask simple questions on gnome-list.
Maybe there are no/very simple problems in you configuration, not in
architecture.

P.S. I see no point in replying to my mail.

-- 
Gediminas
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8-285-38560 :: http://menesis.lietuvybe.org/