Re: Do we need policy changes?
Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: Hello, Thanks for your input. I really don't know how to express what I want to say :) It has come to my mind a few days ago when the Vera fonts were released to public. My problem was: everybody was acting like mad, screaming at last, some good fonts for linux!, whereas, as far as I remember, these fonts lacks many many scripts, starting with the simpliest ones like Cyrillic. I don't even want to mention double-width characters. The same with some GPL'ed fonts release newly (don't remember the name, something starting with a 'd') - nothing except latin1. Same with This would require people with skills and tools to extend those fonts. I'm not even sure this can be done with Free Software, but this is probably a very valid request. Since the Internet is English-centric, most of its outcome is presumably in English. Problem: fonts contain insufficient characters Solution: find font designers to complete them I don't know how and where to find them. Maybe newsforge.net wants to host a story and maybe with much luck a designer is found. You could also ask Bitstream who just released a set of free fonts, to complete their work. otherwise excellent Knoppix-CD (OK, it's not a Debian release, but a good example of not caring about i18n and l10n): if you start it with the Russian interface, the fonts are plain ugly - nothing was made to ensure anti-aliasing for example. Since Knoppix is a German effort, it's pure luck that it is bilingual. :-) Even though I disagree with you, Knoppix is indeed a very good example. Klaus created Knoppix for a particular reason, and since that reason did not contain l10n other than Germany, why should he care? It would only distract him from the main issue. However, since Knoppix is a Free Software effort as well, you are welcome to a) re-create a knoppix-ru.iso and add proper Russian support, or b) subscribe to debian-knoppix[1] and help Klaus add support if he agrees that this is a desirable goal and it would still fit on the CD. As Manoj pointed out, that's how Free Software works: If you find a lack of something, report it and eventually fix it yourself and release patches. What I think about is some regulated way to care about the needs of international debian users. Let's take an example: some programm???plays badly along with UTF-8 and therefore can't be properly used by me, as I need e.g. both German and Russian. I can as well file Please name these programs, report proper bug reports, eventually add patches. a bug against it, but it wouldn't matter much, as the maintainer would just say 'it's not supported upstream' and nothing would happen. Other Maybe the maintainer just has no clue about how UTF should work in that particular application and can't do much about it other than wait until upstream has a clue and implements it. However, there's nothing wrong with Debian shipping a fully utf-8 compliant version while the upstream version does not contain support for utf-8. That does require somebody skilled enough to implement it, though. Even if the Debian maintainer won't include patches to make the application work well with utf8, you (or somebody else) could still provide a foo-utf package that contains proper support in addition to the usual foo package. That's how Japanese support was added to many applications when the Debian-JP team actually joined Debian and inserted their prior work in form of tons of foo-ja packages. Most of them should be merged with the normal foo package nowardays. situation would arise, if something like interoperability in different language environments had been (I'm just speculating) a part of Debian Policy. In that case, package at least could have been marked as 'non-functioning under non-latin circumstances' and this could possibly lead to exclusion from Debian, or separating it into a diffenrent part of debian (like non-US is) etc. This way, a possible user could be warned in advance and maybe lead to the break-through for Unicode. You could always file grave bug reports against such packages and prevent Debian to release a new stable version ever... You could also try to plaster in our policy that a package needs to be UTF-8 complient. But then again, it's also forbidden to move over a street if the light is red. Somebody else mentioned a web page that contains a list of packages that work well with UTF8 and a list of packages that doesn't, together with a list of packages that need to be investigated. This is how Debian-IPv6 works. Fabio maintains such a web page, iirc. Regards, Joey [1] http://mailman.linuxtag.org/ should have details -- If nothing changes, everything will remain the same. -- Barne's Law Please always Cc to me when replying to me on the lists.
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Mon, Apr 21, 2003 at 10:11:48PM +0200, Martin Schulze wrote: Maybe the maintainer just has no clue about how UTF should work in that particular application and can't do much about it other than wait until upstream has a clue and implements it. I'm in this position, I'm upstream and maintainer for one package which has had a bug filed against it (gnump3d #180523). I know that the correct solution is to use UTF, but I'm really not that sure how to go about it. Patches or even pointers to decent documentation would be wonderful. Steve ---
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: The point is actually that deb??an (and others) doesn't care much about internationalization, no matter what they say. I'm just trying to be Go away. I hate trolls that make little of the work of others... If you think something is actively being i18n/l10n unfriendly, file a bug against that. The correct severity is either grave (if it is a required dependency of anything that is i18n/l10n-friendly, and thus it is breaking that thing's l10n/i18n support), or normal otherwise. And the fix for that bug might not be what you expect, AND still be a proper fix. -- One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie. -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, 20 Apr 2003 00:26:04 +0200, Nikolai Prokoschenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: What I think about is some regulated way to care about the needs of international debian users. Let's take an example: some programmplays badly along with UTF-8 and therefore can't be properly used by me, as I need e.g. both German and Russian. I can as well file a bug against it, but it wouldn't matter much, as the maintainer would just say 'it's not supported upstream' and nothing would happen. And what exactly have *YOU* done about it, apart from whinging? manoj -- Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberrys! Monty Python and the Holy Grail Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/ 1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, 20 Apr 2003 02:05:33 +0200, Eduard Bloch [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: A point. What *is* yours? Read. Just read and try with imagination. = Better, flexible and _smooth_ i18n in debian-desktop. Something userfriendly but not easy to achieve without conditional dependencies, debconf config with controllable queue order and some other things I have already told about in the past :( Apart from telling various and sundry people about it, have you done anything? This is free software. If it scratches youtr itch, fix it. And send patches. manoj -- Windows NT Beer: Comes in 32-oz. cans, but you can only buy it by the truckload. This causes most people to have to go out and buy bigger refrigerators. The can looks just like Windows 3.1 Beer's, but the company promises to change the can to look just like Windows 95 Beer's -- after Windows 95 beer starts shipping. Touted as an industrial strength beer, and suggested only for use in bars. Manoj Srivastava [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/%7Esrivasta/ 1024R/C7261095 print CB D9 F4 12 68 07 E4 05 CC 2D 27 12 1D F5 E8 6E 1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
Re: Do we need policy changes?
Moin Henrique! Henrique de Moraes Holschuh schrieb am Sunday, den 20. April 2003: On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: The point is actually that deb??an (and others) doesn't care much about internationalization, no matter what they say. I'm just trying to be Go away. Come on, is fscking wish reports a good way to communicate with users? If you think something is actively being i18n/l10n unfriendly, file a bug against that. The correct severity is either grave (if it is a required Against what? Who is to blame? Who cares? For example, as user, I would like mlterm to work with UTF8 out of the box when I install (bogus) utf8-environment package plus language-ru? See #186983 and tell us how you, as maintainer, could _ensure_ that the damn thing works (with the best font for this charset environment) _and_ works like the user expects it. Yes, you may say that this is something debian-desktop should work with, but a) who is debian-desktop and b) how should debian-desktop (whoever it is, most likely the each maintianer) deal with it without having a sane structure to make things flexible? And before you do not have the answer or if you did never work in a complelete UTF-8 environment at all (or permanently charset-switching environment), please think twice befre you raise your voice. dependency of anything that is i18n/l10n-friendly, and thus it is breaking that thing's l10n/i18n support), or normal otherwise. And the fix for that bug might not be what you expect, AND still be a proper fix. Oh please, he is a pure USER. It is nasty to deal with charset switching in every program, you have to find out how to do it, you have to find out what maintainers forgot, you have to do some research with apt-cache to locate and replace some packages with the UTF-8 versions. I do not say that UTF-8 support on Debian is generaly bad (or worse than with other distributions), but the last (user-relevant) step of the setup is not user-friendly at all. MfG, Eduard. -- Wir wissen nicht was wir tun, das aber mit System!
Re: Do we need policy changes?
Nikolai Prokoschenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: My problem was: everybody was acting like mad, screaming at last, some good fonts for linux!, whereas, as far as I remember, these fonts lacks many many scripts, starting with the simpliest ones like Cyrillic. I don't even want to mention double-width characters. The What do you suggest? Shouldn't we package these fonts before they are of use to everybody? used by me, as I need e.g. both German and Russian. I can as well file a bug against it, but it wouldn't matter much, as the maintainer would just say 'it's not supported upstream' and nothing would happen. Other What do you suggest? Well at least the maintainer should probally forward the bug upstream and mark it forwarded. Not that this alone would help very much. The only way to really improve the general situation is if someone who cares does the work. For exampel the IPv6-developers has done a lot of work this way. Finding packages with disabled IPv6-support finding patches and pushing them upward a that kind of stuff. You as utf8-interrested have to do the same to improve the situation. language environments had been (I'm just speculating) a part of Debian Policy. In that case, package at least could have been marked as 'non-functioning under non-latin circumstances' and this could We have the BTS for this kind of information. And why should we pull packages that works 95% of the time? That would be damaging. Please find some way to improve the situation without doing great harm to those statisfied with status quo. If you force people to put a lot of work in something they don't want they are going to be even more resisting changes. Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. I doesn't think any of the above counts as paranoia which obvious doesn't mean that you aren't paranoid. What you have missed? Probally some basic facts of how stuff is done with the least damage. -- Peter Makholm | I have no caps-lock but I must scream... [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- Greg http://hacking.dk |
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, Eduard Bloch wrote: On Sun, 20 Apr 2003, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: The point is actually that deb??an (and others) doesn't care much about internationalization, no matter what they say. I'm just trying to be Go away. Come on, is fscking wish reports a good way to communicate with users? Of course it is not. But you get the treatment you ask for... and being insulting IS asking to be ignored or insulted back. Since it is an user report, I was quite civilized... If you think something is actively being i18n/l10n unfriendly, file a bug against that. The correct severity is either grave (if it is a required Against what? Who is to blame? Who cares? For example, as user, I would like Well, you don't have to care much about it. Any Debian maintainer worth the name knows how to reassign bug reports. mlterm to work with UTF8 out of the box when I install (bogus) utf8-environment package plus language-ru? See #186983 and tell us how you, as maintainer, could _ensure_ that the damn thing works (with the best font for this charset environment) _and_ works like the user expects it. Ensure? I would create a sub-project Debian-desktop-RU that had all defaults tweaked so that it would work. I don't think there is anything else you can do that will *ensure* it will always be at best .ru condition. There is also the often-forgotten X resources. Configure everything correctly through it... It is not impossible to get all packages to cooperate enough that you can do so. And a X term that can't handle resources is so broken, it deserves a grave bug to keep it out of Debin stable until it learns to do so [I am speaking this with my Debian QA hat on]. Then package the resources and call it debian-desktop-ru or something. but a) who is debian-desktop and b) how should debian-desktop (whoever it is, most likely the each maintianer) deal with it without having a sane structure to make things flexible? Well, what is missing to have this sane structure? Propose it well enough, and if someone that can implement it starts, it will be done. THAT IS HOW DEBIAN WORKS. And the fix for that bug might not be what you expect, AND still be a proper fix. Oh please, he is a pure USER. It is nasty to deal with charset switching I don't know if you noticed yet, but being a pure user in Debian does not mean we will assume you are a braindead moron that cannot think or learn for yourself. That is exactly what set us appart from other distros. And yes, this DOES have its drawbacks sometimes. other distributions), but the last (user-relevant) step of the setup is not user-friendly at all. Then work at improving it. UTF8 in Debian is _very_ imature still, and even a how to make your package UTF-8 friendly document that you could write (and posted to d-devel and d-desktop if you don't know better places to put it in, since someone will read it and update the other stuff with it if it is good enough) would help things immensely. But don't be insulting at the people who DO spend a lot of effort with l18n while you're at it. -- One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond where the shadows lie. -- The Silicon Valley Tarot Henrique Holschuh
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 10:34:10AM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh schrieb am Sunday, den 20. April 2003: Go away. Come on, is fscking wish reports a good way to communicate with users? Yes. If they say things like deb??an (and others) doesn't care much about internationalization, no matter what they say, then they should be told to go away. That kind of shit just demoralizes the people who are doing the work. Richard Braakman
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 02:28:13AM +0200, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. AS A point. What *is* yours? The point is actually that deb??an (and others) doesn't care much about internationalization, no matter what they say. I'm just trying to be diplomatic,???not to risk a 'Do It Yourself' Answer. I'd like to have solutions. There's no magic wand for i18n/l10n. Every application has to be handled individually, and every language needs some global tuning before stuff will work right. We can't do anything about general stuff like this, because it's open-ended. Pick specific stuff that you care about and see what can be done with it. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | Dept. of Computing, `. `' | Imperial College, `- -- | London, UK pgpyPMAKBX9mK.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 02:05:33AM +0200, Eduard Bloch wrote: #include hallo.h * Andrew Suffield [Sun, Apr 20 2003, 12:29:49AM]: On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 12:26:04AM +0200, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. A point. What *is* yours? Read. Just read and try with imagination. Lengthly and vague and it's easier for me to ask him to get to the point than to read through it all. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | Dept. of Computing, `. `' | Imperial College, `- -- | London, UK pgpy8JcXYh58A.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Do we need policy changes?
And why should we pull packages that works 95% of the time? One of the release goals for Woody (I believe) was that everything is 8-bit clean. The same could have been said for that; why should we pull packages that work 95% of the time? (And if 8-bit cleanness is not 95% of the time, then neither is not handling UTF-8, considering that's requirement for India, home of over a sixth of the world's population.) -- David Starner - [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ic sæt me on anum leahtrice, ða com heo and bát me!
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sunday 20 April 2003 10:09, Manoj Srivastava wrote: Apart from telling various and sundry people about it, have you done anything? This is free software. If it scratches youtr itch, fix it. And send patches. The original author stated that it occurs that upstream rejects UTF-8 fixes and the like. So, here's my proposal, Nikolai: Make a public webpage with a list of all projects which reject such fixes, and/or maintainers who claim that their upstream rejects such fixes. Add a column to this list with applications and libraries which lack proper support, so people can see where it's worth working on improvements and where it's worth checking out alternative projects if nothing happens after some time. Further improvements can be accellerated by adding support on development tools (for instance automake still cannot handle i18n'd manpages), even though this is not always easy to do. Another example: The German translation of passwd(1) is from 1993, and is plain wrong. The way to handle such issues is not to complain, but to run: apt-cache show `dpkg -S /usr/share/man/de/man1/passwd.1.gz | cut -d : -f 1` | grep Maintainer ...and to send the guy in question a mail with an updated manpage (or use the BTS in more complicated cases, or send it to upstream directly where it makes sense). Sarge will have an updated version, because I cared about it :) Josef -- Play for fun, win for freedom.
Re: Do we need policy changes?
other distributions), but the last (user-relevant) step of the setup is not user-friendly at all. Then work at improving it. UTF8 in Debian is _very_ imature still, and even a how to make your package UTF-8 friendly document that you could write (and posted to d-devel and d-desktop if you don't know better places to put it in, since someone will read it and update the other stuff with it if it is good enough) would help things immensely. That document would certainly be a good idea, and I would take it to heart. I would certainly love to make my prospective packages as UTF-8 (and i18n in gerenal) friendly as possible. -- Morgon Kanter GPG key ID: 297CEA5B If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, there'd be peace. -- John Lennon
Do we need policy changes?
Hello, I really don't know how to express what I want to say :) It has come to my mind a few days ago when the Vera fonts were released to public. My problem was: everybody was acting like mad, screaming at last, some good fonts for linux!, whereas, as far as I remember, these fonts lacks many many scripts, starting with the simpliest ones like Cyrillic. I don't even want to mention double-width characters. The same with some GPL'ed fonts release newly (don't remember the name, something starting with a 'd') - nothing except latin1. Same with otherwise excellent Knoppix-CD (OK, it's not a Debian release, but a good example of not caring about i18n and l10n): if you start it with the Russian interface, the fonts are plain ugly - nothing was made to ensure anti-aliasing for example. What I think about is some regulated way to care about the needs of international debian users. Let's take an example: some programmplays badly along with UTF-8 and therefore can't be properly used by me, as I need e.g. both German and Russian. I can as well file a bug against it, but it wouldn't matter much, as the maintainer would just say 'it's not supported upstream' and nothing would happen. Other situation would arise, if something like interoperability in different language environments had been (I'm just speculating) a part of Debian Policy. In that case, package at least could have been marked as 'non-functioning under non-latin circumstances' and this could possibly lead to exclusion from Debian, or separating it into a diffenrent part of debian (like non-US is) etc. This way, a possible user could be warned in advance and maybe lead to the break-through for Unicode. Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. -- Nikolai Prokoschenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] / Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Do we need policy changes?
On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 12:26:04AM +0200, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. A point. What *is* yours? -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | Dept. of Computing, `. `' | Imperial College, `- -- | London, UK pgphMM5Ly7Ruo.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Do we need policy changes?
#include hallo.h * Andrew Suffield [Sun, Apr 20 2003, 12:29:49AM]: On Sun, Apr 20, 2003 at 12:26:04AM +0200, Nikolai Prokoschenko wrote: Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. A point. What *is* yours? Read. Just read and try with imagination. = Better, flexible and _smooth_ i18n in debian-desktop. Something userfriendly but not easy to achieve without conditional dependencies, debconf config with controllable queue order and some other things I have already told about in the past :( MfG, Eduard. -- Es sind aber die Schmutzigsten, von denen man sagt, daß sie mit allen Wassern gewaschen sind. pgpDFBc4kGrvd.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Do we need policy changes?
Andrew Suffield [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. AS A point. What *is* yours? The point is actually that deban (and others) doesn't care much about internationalization, no matter what they say. I'm just trying to be diplomatic,not to risk a 'Do It Yourself' Answer. I'd like to have solutions. -- Nikolai Prokoschenko [EMAIL PROTECTED] / Jabber: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Do we need policy changes?
Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have missed in the observing the subject. AS A point. What *is* yours? The point is actually that deban (and others) doesn't care much about internationalization, no matter what they say. I'm just trying to be diplomatic,not to risk a 'Do It Yourself' Answer. I'd like to have solutions. That's a very interesting answer. At least I do care about internationalization, and I do some work on that respect; and it has been improving. At least, Japanese support has become very good. regards, junichi
