> Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2021 13:38:56 +0200 > From: Tino Didriksen <m...@tinodidriksen.com> > To: "[apertium-stuff]" <apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net> > Reply-To: apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net > Subject: [Apertium-stuff] Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) going EOL > Pièce(s) jointes(s) probable(s)> > Reminder that Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial will reach end-of-life in a few days. If > you're still on Xenial, upgrade. > > Similarly, Debian 9 Stretch is becoming long in the tooth. > > -- Tino Didriksen >
Well, I was waiting a message of that kind to do a suggestion. I am of a generation who find it normal to use a camera to take pictures, a phone to make phone calls, a watch to get the exact time, and a hammer to hit something. But a computer stays a multi-use device. If somebody uses a computer ONLY to work with Apertium, there should not be a problem changing distribution every 6 months. In fact, even then, it is not entirely true as a text editor is needed, and the behavior of the favorite text editor (especially if it is graphical) may change from one distribution to the next one. When something exists and works fine, it should never disappear to be replaced by something worse. But for things we can buy as for software, including free software, it sometimes happens. When I discovered Apertium, I had Mandriva 2009 installed on my computer. Apertium didn't work with it. So, I also installed Debian 6. On Mandriva 2009, there were 2 things that I liked and never found again: a gadget displaying a color world map with the areas where it's daylight called kworldclock and a file explorer on which, when clicking on an picture file, the picture was displayed into a tab, instead of opening a new window which was often too small from the first photo and quickly always too small when using arrows to see other ones, some portrait oriented, others landscape oriented. So, even if Debian 6 has extra possibilities, I still used Mandriva 2009 for a few more years for image processing with Gimp. A few years later, I needed Debian 7 to make Apertium work. I did a copy of Debian 6 with all the tools installed and upgraded it to Debian 7. But the gnome 3 GUI works differently as the previous one and I didn't find it easy to configure. This was a reason to continue using Debian 6 as much as possible. I found the solution to compile Apertium with Debian 7 and continue using it on Debian 6 without cg which was replaced by the cat command for pairs using it. Then, more and more websites stopped working with Firefox 31 which is the last, or one of the very last versions to work with Debian 6 without crashing quickly. I ended up reinstalling Debian 7 with xfce4. The GUI is less confusing and the video editor I use with Debian 6 but whose the most interesting features for me are disabled with gnome 3 worked again. On the other hand, when starting gedit and asking to open a file from it, a lot of mp4, mp3, ogg, jpg, png, etc ... files are shown. These are files from different directories I accessed during the 2 last weeks but NOT with gedit! I couldn't find a way to disable this stupid spying system and that did me hating xfce4. Last year in spring I had for work to use Discord software which now requires a 64 bit OS. I prepared a Devuan 2 on a separate disc to use it. But I also noticed a change in the design of gedit whose top menu and some icons disappeared. I found the last version less convenient to use and lost several new files and several changes as it was less easy to save data. Finally, at the beginning of this year, I discovered that Debian 10 with Mute has a GUI similar to gnome 2. The version of gedit that I like is present and now called pluma. A problem I find with gedit is that it only proposes the last 5 edited files (I would prefer 10 or rather 20). Pluma does not propose more. I will have to ask them how to change that. On Debian 6, I found a pity that the video editor only allow very few couples of values for width and height for saving files in ogg format. The new one working on Debian 10 normally allows MP4 to be encoded (it is better), but as long as some possibilities of the software are displayed in white on a white background, it is unusable. But despite these problems that need to be corrected plus some blockages with a color zebra skin kind of display from which using the reset button is the only way to get out (problem also observed on Devuan 2), I think I will use Debian 10 for the next 5 years instead of Debian 7. For Apertium, I work on it as a hobby and since at least 2 years I also have also other activities to do on my computer during my free time. This is the main reason why I did not worked much on language pairs recently. But the need to update regularly the operating system is an extra reason and during last summer, after discussing with Hector Alos about change in paradigms for generation when the analysis of the word gives mf or sp tag, I finally did nothing because my computer was not ready to compile the language. Normally for the operating system, Apertium is not something complicated : reading files, processing data. For Apertium C++ programs, you use several libraries. I understand you prefer using then for decoding XML instead of rewriting this part. But after more than 10 years Apertium exists, I am surprised you still need things that did not exists in system libraries few years ago. So, a recent version of Apertium tools does not compile on a less recent operating system. And you recently said somebody who use MAC OS that his version is not supported. Now you ask to upgrade a version of Ubuntu and also Debian 9. Before few years, that will be the same for Debian 10 and after Debian 11 ... At that time, several changes done on Apertium programs may prevent them to compile. So, permanent changes may be needed to continue using Apertium that worked fine earlier. I think for the operating system versions on which Apertium can be compiled now, Apertium can be broadcast as it is. But for any other operating system compatible with C++ language and pipe processing, a solution could be to give both source code of Apertium tools ans source code of system libraries it uses. These libraries would be compiled with Apertium tools using them and object files stored outside /usr/lib . So, there would not be compatibility problems with other version of the same library in the distribution. That may do big executables, a long time to compile the whole, but if that allows to use Apertium on any Windows, Mac OS, GNU/Linux and others with the same source files, it will be better than the present solution. -------------------------------- Bernard Chardonneau (France) Phone : [33] 9 72 36 32 90 GSM phone : [33] 7 69 46 16 31 An alternative Apertium translation website : http://apertiumtrad.tuxfamily.org Multilingual websites for my free softwares : http://libremail.free.fr and http://libremail.tuxfamily.org http://cyloop.tuxfamily.org (mainly translated with Apertium) My general website (in french only) http://bech.free.fr _______________________________________________ Apertium-stuff mailing list Apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/apertium-stuff
