Digging back to an old post I meant to reply to earlier. On Thu, Aug 2, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Gil Forcada <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > As I said in previous mails, let this mail be a kickstart for giving > feedback about the items that are defined on > https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012 > > In this mail please give feedback about the glibc locales item. > > Cheers, > -- > Gil Forcada
Quoting from: https://live.gnome.org/TranslationProject/Events/GTPBoFGUADEC2012 glibc locales Background: Now and then new translation projects appear on GNOME i18n mailing list. Sadly most of them needs to create a glibc locale, which is both a tedious and a complex process in itself. Having some expertise and knowledge about how the glibc locale does work, knowing who can help on both creating the locale and getting the locale on glibc will greatly help those new languages. Bullet points: we need to gather some expertise on it Gil, This is an issue very near and dear to my heart. By the nature of the user communities that Sugar Labs seeks to serve, we are often involved in assisting with the development of glibc locales for languages or regions that are not currently represented in the glibc project. I have taken it upon myself to reach out to people needing assistance with glibc locale creation (usually off-list, but sometimes on-list). In general, I am happy to continue to perform this sort of orientation, consultation and hand holding on the arcane art of developing glibc locales. For example, the initial message about nhn_MX, followed by a few friendly off-list e-mails: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2012-August/msg00041.html Has produced this ticket: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14501 I think we need to acknowledge that there are bigger problems with regard to glibc locales, in particular their submission and correction workflow, than the occasional message to this list and even the technical complexity of creating one. Claude Paroz has done excellent work on facilitating the constructing the obscure Unicode code point required format for glibc locales. http://lh.2xlibre.net/locales/ However, I think the core issue with glibc locales as it relates to i18n/L10n is the fact that the responsiveness of the glibc team to locale-related tickets is in need of real and immediate improvement. Take a look at the list of pending localedata bugs filed against the glibc component. http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/buglist.cgi?product=glibc&component=localedata&resolution=---&list_id=5916 I have submitted locale patches that are obvious (even to an English-only speaker), indisputably correct and entirely uncontroversial that have been sitting in the queue for months with out attention: http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=13950 Similar delays are encountered by people who have submitted new glibc locale files. This is a huge barrier to entry for new languages and frankly it is all too easy to kill the momentum of a new language effort. It is critical to work with new language efforts while the enthusiasm is high, so that it can be maintained by visible signs of progress. We all know that the glibc bug-tracker has long had a (well-deserved and notorious) reputation as a very unfriendly place to interact with the Gnome project. What is needed is someone on the glibc team that has a focus purely on the localedata and a modicum of basic social skills that is willing to deal with newcomers to the Gnome world in a welcoming fashion. In addition, ideally something like the work that Claude has done on his Locale Helper needs to be turned into a web-app like the CLDR locale submission process Survey Tool and integrated into Gnome's SOPs for locale submission. Improving the "customer service" ethos of the glibc locale submission process is essential and long overdue, facilitating it with a user-friendly tool would be icing on the cake. Just my thoughts. What are yours? cjl Sugar Labs Translation Team Coordinator _______________________________________________ gnome-i18n mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-i18n
