On 31 déc. 07, at 22:04, Christian Lohmaier wrote:
Hi Jean-Christophe, *,
I hope it is OK to reply in english - if not, I'll try to write a
short response in french.
No problem. I suppose I can remove the French 2 French lists in Cc but
I'll keep them just for this mail.
Let me summarize my idea after a very quick reading of your document.
Which also means that I may not be fully understanding your rationale.
Basically the proposal is to have a package per language to install
over a "default" OOo.app.
If I am correct, that is the way NeoOffice deals with localization
packages.
Personally, I find that confusing. And a number of Japanese people I
know who use NeoOffice also found the setting awkward and were
actually not aware of the existence of Japanese package until I
downloaded it for them.
As a (relatively) long time user of Mac, and a user of pretty much all
of its multilingual functions I find that its main appeal is that
localization is a transparent process. No need to install extra
packages, everything is inside the application already.
I understand that the problem with OOo is the sheer number of
available localizations/the size of one localization set/technical
questions related to the code itself. So it may not be possible in the
near future to propose a multilanguage package the way users are used
to for "standard" mac apps.
So, with these 2 perspectives in mind, my first reaction is to suggest
the following:
Provide the "localizer" application _with_ OOo.app (ie inside the
same .dmg) so that users are aware right away of the existence of
localizations.
This has one main benefit: their is no necessity anymore to have pre-
built language versions.
Plus, the localizer application could actually be a "dummy" installer
that downloads the requested localization package and installs it on
the OOo.app package once it is copied to the user's disk.
That l10n installer package needs to be localized, for that, there is
a need to keep the number of strings to a minimum _and_ to keep them
generic enough that they can be automatically generated from the
existing localization packages themselves (I am strictly talking about
string extraction to build the l10n package _before_ it is released).
I may be totally off the mark though. Let me know.
On Dec 31, 2007 1:07 PM, Jean-Christophe Helary
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Je viens de lire le document et je me demande si au lieu d'avoir un
LanguagePack séparé de OpenOffice, il ne serait pas plus simple de
l'avoir dans le .dmg qui contient OpenOffice.org.
L'utilisateur a 2 applicatifs en face de lui, il copie le
OpenOffice.app dans le dossier de son choix puis lance le
LanguagePack
à partir du .dmg.
If the user only want one single language, the user can just download
the full installation set for that language.
Adding multiple languagepack to one single installer will nullify one
of the major benefits:
Small download size.
But creating multiple-language containing installsets would require a
major rewrite of the packaging process as a whole. I don't see how
this could be done in a sensible way using drag'n'drop install (or
manual installation as apple calls it), we would have to swtich to
using a "managed install", i.e. using apples's installation program.
But when using that we will loose much of the flexibility we have now.
for example it will not be easy to install OOo as user into a custom
directory or to install multiple versions of OOo, as for languagepacks
those could only work with a fixed installation location then. Let
alone the problems in creating a pkg without using apples GUI tools
which will make it hard to automatically build OOo.
As I already replied to Eric on [EMAIL PROTECTED], this is nothing I want to
add to that cws. It is out-of-scope of the current approach and might
be possible in future, but it would have to be implemented in a
dedicated cws (and of course agreed on first)
And honestly, I don't really see the benefit of having a
multi-langauge installation. the "big" languages will have a full
installation sets anyway. Language packs are meant mainly for those
who want to test (or use) OOo in multiple localisations (that is only
a small set of users), and for those languages where there is no full
installset (Maho currently builds all languages, but because of the
size of the installsets, they cannot be mirrored using the main mirror
network, and of course building the installsets takes a lot of time as
well, languagepacks can be built much faster)
Having a multi-language installset will mean for most users: They need
to download more data without a real benefit. If OOo was a small
program, this wouldn't be a problem, but it is a huge download.
De cette manière, pas de pb de version qui ne correspondent pas.
Non-matching versions shouldn't be a problem anyway. Localisations
don't get updated too often, and even when you install a languagepack
that doesn't correspond to the base version of OOo, then you might not
get every string correctly translated, but OOo should still work
without any loss in functionality.
Par ailleurs, les dialogues du LanguagePack gagneront à être
localisés et à être sensibles à l'environnement linguistique de
l'utilisateur.
Here there is a big conceptual problem. OOo is available in more
languages than is Mac OSX.
So the languagepack could only be localized to the version of the
language that is about to be installed. But this makes it harder for
an administrator to install additional languages for the users of the
machine, in case he doesn't speak that language.
I'm not sure what the best way to go is in that regard.
Sur le document, le seul dialogue localisé était le
dialogue de OSX correspondant à l'identification de l'utilisateur
(allemand) donc je suppose que l'application n'est pas encore prête à
la localisation.
Well, the identifaction dialog is Mac OSX's own dialog, it is not
possible to localize that dialog, it always will use Mac's language.
And of course the strings in the dialogs could be localized, but no
translation is performed yet.
(and as written above, I'm not sure what language to choose. To me,
the most logical would be to use the language of the langauge that is
to be installed, and that wouldn't be a big problem to add)
Plus que 3h pour 2007 de ce coté du monde !
Well, you're one of the first to land in 2008 then - happy new year
:-)) Here it is still a little more than 10 hours to go :-)
Thanks for the feedback,
ciao
Christian
Jean-Christophe Helary
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