On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 15:47 -0500, Mackenzie Morgan wrote: > On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 20:57 +0100, Surfaz Gemon Meme wrote: > > If they know English, do not need English support of Ubuntu. > > If they do not know English, I do not think the English support of > > Ubuntu could change something. > > There are different values of "know." They might know enough English to > file a bug saying "Firefox crashed" but then the logs they post will be > in, for example, Croatian. Most triagers don't speak Croatian, so we > can't read the logs. And the reporter might not know enough English to > translate all of the tech jargon in the logs, besides the amount of time > it'd take. At least the icons on the buttons can help when they use an > English version to gather English logs.
I thought I'd just post this so everyone is on the same page WRT internationalization in GNU/Linux systems. For those that already know, sorry for the noise :-) GNU/Linux uses the gettext package for i18n. There are other packages used by other UNIX systems, which use large catalogs of numbers to look up the right translations for each string, but this is a big pain and is especially painful for distributed development/translation teams such as you're likely to have in free software. Gettext uses a really interesting trick to avoid the need for predefined catalogs, at the expense of some runtime effort. Basically, it uses the string to be translated itself as the key for looking up the translated string. At runtime, when a translation is needed, the gettext library is invoked with the static string to be translated as the argument. It generates a hash based on the contents of that string, then looks up the hashed value in the translation catalog. If there's an entry for that hashed value, then it is returned to the caller. If there is no entry, then the string that was provided is returned. What does this mean for the current discussion? It means that the "default" string is encoded right into the program. So, even if NO language packs are provided, all gettext programs will still print the default string. This default is typically called the "C" locale, for hysterical raisins. Virtually all default strings are written in English. So, if you're happy with the default strings you really don't need to install any language packs whatsoever. And certainly, if you want to use a different locale than English, you can get away with ONLY that locale being installed; if you don't have a satisfactory translation of the string in your chosen locale it will use the default string... and that's in English. Or if it isn't it's definitely in whatever language the developers of that utility wrote the code in :-). IOW, there's really no reason to specifically install the English language packs, if you don't want to use a locale of en_US or whatever. Certainly you don't need to do it for any sort of debugging purposes. If you want to force "no locale" to generate screenshots or whatever you can just use "LC_ALL=C firefox". -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
