Re: Thinking about Dogfood

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On Mon, 13 Aug 2001, Gediminas Paulauskas wrote:

> 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.

 Please don't say such things. I'm not that stupid to be unable to configure
my system (and I have no doubts that I'm among the top 3 of most capable and
experienced gnome hackers from russia). Yes, I don't have time to hack
anymore..

> 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?

 May be they are just hoping that somebody will fix the bugs later.
 
> I have ONE problem in using Evolution. Actually there are more, but they are

 Lucky you. I can't use russian in my email address, I can't name my email
account in russian, strings evolution inserts in my mails when I reply
(localized "On <date> <who> wrote") get converted to sequence of underscores,
subjects of messages in russian composed in OutLook get converted to sequence 
of underscores (since they are sent raw), so I can't collaborate with people
using OutLook express at all. And Evo doesn't have i18n-related means any
mature MUA has (ability to select charset to interpret the current message in
message view with, ability to configure content-transfer-encoding to send
messages in, etc).

> 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.

 What's the problem? I have no problems with gtk+ and fonts and koi8-r.

[..]
> 
> >  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".

 No, this mail wasn't dedicated to getting job in Ximian, really. You
got wrong impression. My mail could be reduced to "ximian developers, please
do your work carefully".

> Wake up, it is free software.

 Actively developed by paid developers of commercial company.

> >  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.

 Yes, I'm actively filing bug reports for all important i18n-related problems
in Ximian's software. Of course I properly (by satisfying all dependencies)
install only rpms from Ximian built by Ximian on RH62 on top of Ximian gnome,
so I assume my system can't be that misconfigured.

 Let's ask Chinese and Japanese people. In March 22 or so in thread "report on
[bad] status of i18n in gnome programs" on gnome-hackers Japanese people said
that gnome programs are broken for them. See thread starting at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-hackers/2001-March/msg00407.html

 And remember, there are two signle-byte encodings equally popular in Russia, 
and a 3 additional ones that are not that popuplar. I guess Lithuania doesn't 
have such situation, so a lot of i18n-related bugs are just hidden.

 Best regards,
  -Vlad