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

[Vlad Harchev <hvv hippo ru>]

On 23 Mar 2001, Lauris Kaplinski wrote:

 Hello,

> If everything would be so simple (developers ignoring i18n issues about their programs),
> I bet, most of these problems would be fixed already...
> 
> I can tell from my experience:
> a) I ported evo internals to utf-8. As a result it folders are crap in filemanagers
> (folders are ordinary directories) for most locales. What to do - no easy solution
> available.
> If app would deal extensively with files it would be a bigger problem. What to do -
> write ugly wrappers - parse locale - ...
> It is certainly not the thing, that application programmers are interested to do. So it
> is simpler to delay the problem, until there appear some consensus about filesystem
> localiszing. But, as I said, if your application deals extensively with files, there
> may be very little other to fix.

 As for Evo: storing everything in utf8 is a good thing, but it's not
sufficient for proper i18n. Evo has to set mail headers correctly, encode text
of the body and subject properly (as per RFCs), and be able to recode on the
fly messages that were received by it (since text of messages can be in any
encoding). So, switch to gtk-2.0 won't help to solve this problem at all. With
current evo, it's useless for anything but sending mail to yourself for
non-latin1 users :(
	
> b) sodipodi has to support libxml1, as that is the 'official' gnome 1.4 xml library.
> I.e. no utf-8 support. And I refuse to add support for legacy 8-bit encodings - so
> the problem simply has to be delayed (or somebody else has to code legacy support).

 That's healthy and, alas, very common position among gnome developers (or
any other free or commercial software developers). So somebody should be
explicitly dedicated to this task. It's amazing feeling that after short
period of hacking an application becomes fully-i18n aware..

> OK. these were examples, but I am sure, there are more problems.
> As of common file formats/protocols, I agree - if spec requires certain encodings, these
> have to be supported. But - as is the case with SVG/libxml1 - you cannot expect
> application programmers to fix underlying system - and usually there are other things to
> do, while waiting for underlying i18n to mature...

 Yes, I agree that there is a problem with libxml1..

> P.S. I strongly support the idea of full-time i18n hacker for Gnome.
>  
> Best wishes,
> Lauris Kaplinski

 Thanks!

 Best regards,
  -Vlad
 
> On 22 Mar 2001 22:06:39 +0400, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> > On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Fatih Demir wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, Mar 22, 2001 at 08:57:42PM +0400, Vlad Harchev wrote:
> > > > [ job searching... ] 
> > > > What do you think about all this?
> > > 
> > > Nice to know, but there's also the problem, that non-iso-latin or whatever
> > >  users do rarely report bugs or contact the authors/developers in such cases.
> > >
> > 
> >  I think they just gave up any hopes... In a lot of cases authors/developers
> > don't know how to fix the problem either since they don't have i18n-related
> > experience.. In some cases developers answer "it's post-gtk-2.0 task"..
> > 
> > > As gtranslator's author, I'll always try to solve such prob's, but there 
> > >  hasn't been any such bug report yet.
> > 
> >  OK, I can post a bugreport against every package that has i18n problems - but 
> > will it help anybody if mostly nobody cares about i18n?
> > 
> >  Unfortunately I'm 99% sure that every app that exports/imports file of
> > wide-spread format or communicates using standartized protocol containing
> > textual data or that uses custom widgets has severe problems with i18n and
> > unusable for non-latin1 users.
> > 
> > For example: evolution just sticks iso8859-1 charset in mail headers it sends
> > (this means nobody can read mails sent with Evo if it contains anything than
> > iso-8859-1), dia (user just can't load files at all (!) that were saved under
> > russian locale), sodipodi (it always assumes that locale uses iso8859-1), 
> > balsa - that's 4 software packages of 4 that meet my "i18n-fragile programs"
> > I tried but not fixed - all of them are totally unusable for russian. 
> > 
> > > -- 
> > > kabalak / kabalak@kabalak.net / Fatih Demir
> > > `-GNOME / ICQ:64241161 / GSM: +491749787080
> > >  `-Editor / vim
> > >   `-Filemanager / VFU
> > 
> >  Best regards,
> >   -Vlad
> >