report on [bad] status of i18n of gnome apps - somebody shouldexplicitly care about it

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

 Hello, 
 
 Executive summary: most gnome apps don't support i18n adequately and are
mostly unusable or even non-functional for non-latin1 (and sometimes for
non-ASCII) users. This can be fixed by a dedicated gnome-i18n hacker though. I
can (and would like to) take this position if some ogranization/company hired
me.
 
 GNOME-1.4 can be considered an advanced desktop environment from a lot of of
perspectives. Unfortunately, i18n of applications shipped with it is not one
of these perspectives. Literally every application and library (with a rare
exception - some of them were fixed - some of them by me personally) that deal
with file formats that are understood by other applications too (i.e. widely
spread formats such as XLS, WMF) or any protocol that transmits text (mail,
news) don't support i18n at all or even sometimes anything except ASCII is not
supported correctly. This means that non-latin users are unable to use these
applications and applications that use such libraries - in the best case such
applications don't allow interchange of data in these widespread format or
using such protocols (peers of the users can't open/use data produced by such
applications and users of such applications can't open data produced by their
peers) rendering applications unusable in networked environment of today, and
in the worst case such applications don't support even basic operations too
(e.g. printing or saving file in the way that won't cause data loss)!

  Transition to gtk-2.0 will *not* solve majority of these problems since
special support and changes in design is needed to support at least import and
export of the widely spread file formats and handling of information
transmitted via protocols like mail and news (since most often textual
information stored in such formats uses arbitrary or different from the user's
locale encoding). Transition to gtk-2.0 will simplify solving or even solve
some basic problems like typing text and not seeing it in proper font though -
but when it will happen? Just to mention that KDE applications don't suffer at
least from these basic problems and KDE apps work much better for non-latin1 
users..

  It's obvious why i18n support should be raised to adequate level, the sooner
the better, even if comfort and feelings of non-latin1 gnome users are ignored
(as usual, cough) - just in order gnome to be considered as viable computing
environment by non-latin users/goverments/distibution vendors/ hackers who
want to hack on some desktop environment.

  I think no more than 1.5 month of work needed for fixing 90% of all software
and libraries shipped with fifth toe and gnome (evolution not included, fixing
it will require almost 2 weeks IMO). So I think dedicated professional i18n
hacker position would be a must have for gnome project, and work of this
person will make gnome friendly (or at least working adequately) for
non-latin1 users. These estimations are made by professional eye and brain
(mine), since I've implemented complete i18n framework for AbiWord (now it
supports even CJK languages without any flaws from i18n perspective),and
recently fixed remaining i18n problems in gnome-print and in gnumeric and
worked on various aspects of gtk dealing with i18n issues.

 I can and would like to take that position of i18n hacker of gnome project
provided some company or organization sponsored my work or even better hired
me.

 What do you think about all this?

 Best regards,
  -Vlad