Hi, At Thu, 15 Nov 2001 09:21:53 -0400, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> However, there really isn't any indication of the degree of support for > the languages listed here. To what extent must there be support for a > language before we tell the world "Debian is available in language foo"? This is a difficult question. For example, Linux console cannot display East Asian languages. Does the fact mean that Debian doesn't support these languages? On the other hand, can a fact that there is only one software which can handle language foo mean that Debian support the language foo? I mean, the expected level of "support" is different from languages to languages. However, there are some signs from which we can say Debian support the language foo. - Existence of debian-<language> mailing list should surely mean there are many users in the language. - "language-env" package supports several languages, which means the speakers of the languages can use Debian. - Existence of "manpages-<language>" package or other "<document>-<language>" package probably means that <language>- speaking people can use Debian in their mother tongue. At least, it surely means that Debian has some methods to display the languages. - There are many packages which contain a name of a language within the names of the packages. It should mean the package supports the language. However, it also means that if you want to use the language you will have to use this special software. "arabtex", "grep-ja", "hanterm", "xiterm+thai", "rxvt-ml", and so on. In spite of such ambiguity, I am sure the list (English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish) is too poor. "language-env" package supports the following languages: 1 : be (Bielaruskaja,Belarusian) 2 : bg (Bulgarian) 3 : de (Deutsch,German) 4 : es (Espanol,Spanish) 5 : fr (Francais,French) 6 : ja (Nihongo,Japanese) 7 : ko (Hangul,Korean) 8 : mk (Makedonski,Macedonian) 9 : pl (Polski,Polish) 10 : ru (Russkii,Russian) 11 : sr (Srpski,Serbian) 12 : th (Thai) 13 : uk (Ukrajins'ka,Ukrainian) Of course these languages are only a part of available language in Debian, because language-env package is not perfect. --- Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/ "Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
