On Fri, May 17, 2002, Moshe Zadka wrote about "Re: official hebrew in Linux-IL mailing lists?": > On Fri, 17 May 2002, "Nadav Har'El" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > If he knew of this thread, Eli'ezer Ben-Yehuda (are you a relative of his? :)) > > would be turning in his grave :( > > Yes. Because Eli'ezer didn't whine. He went out there and wrote patches.
MosheZ, it sounds like you're playing the devil's advocate here. It sounds like you don't claim you don't want this list to be in Hebrew, but rather that you don't want Hebrew to be used on Linux, EVER. Please don't pretend you don't understand why some people would prefer to write Hebrew messages here. Have you never seen people that know basic English but find it hard to express themselves well in that language? I know many university students that even find it difficult to read long English letters, and have English articles translated for them; These people are not stupid or illiterate - they just know Hebrew much better than their basic English. Also, please don't pretend that while the iso8859 (8 bit) encodings are still alive it is possible to use Hebrew without any configuration - after all, how is your mail client, xterm or console going to know that the 8bit email you're reading is in Hebrew and not in Swedish? Also, please don't pretend that's it's impossible, or even very hard to set up your system to read and write Hebrew. It shouldn't be harder than setting up your (say) modem. In a perfect world, you'd even have a set of RPMs (or DEBs or whatever) that installing them would give you out-of-the-box Hebrew support (that's what I hoped ivrix.org.il will achieve, but so far this hasn't happened). Of course, that assumes that you're open to embracing the newer Hebrew- supporting software. If you insist on using an X11 installation from 1992 (I think that was the last time the "heb8x13" font wasn't included in the default installation), insist on using "joe" (which doesn't have Hebrew support, according to you), insist on connecting to your Linux through the serial port and a English/Swedish VT100 terminal - well you're out of luck. But if you're really interested in reading or writing Hebrew, it isn't that terribly difficult to set it up. All the pieces of advice on how to use Hebrew on Linux have been floating around on the ivrix-discuss list (and also in this list). Tzafrir has a good FAQ about this subject. Note that 90% of the advice in there isn't necessary for a functioning Hebrew system - Tzafrir just likes to cover all the bases (which is good). > This is stupid. I don't have to install any program to read swedish, > do I? I realize it is harder to patch existing code, but if you want > to push an agenda, you should not insist everybody spend their precious > time to help you push it. Of course you need to install a program to read Swedish! If you don't use utf8 (I assume you don't), do you think that taking a 8-bit Swedish file and "cat"ing it would just show you the Swedish characters? (actually, I don't even know if Swedish has characters that are not in Latin1... I assume there are, otherwise your example is completely unfair) So you'd need to run "xterm -fn some-swedish-supporting-font", you'd need your editor to let you type those extra Swedish characters (assuming there are such), and so on... Maybe it's slightly easier than setting up Hebrew, but Hebrew's "right-to-left" writing is undeniably a bigger problem than Swedish's extra 2 characters (again, assuming there are some... If not, just replace "Swedish" by a more appropriate example). > > So reading Hebrew email is easy. > > As long as you want to configure your mailer on every system you > use. Every system you use? Do you seriously mean to suggest that your read your mail on many different systems, and each has a completely different OS and configuration? If that is the case, your mail synchronization troubles and plain-old configuration troubles are probably worse than your Hebrew troubles. > Ah, but I don't want to write a Hebrew message -- you want to have the official > list be Hebrew only, which means I'll have to in order to send mail to > linux-il. It wasn't me who wanted the list to be Hebrew-only. In fact I said I prefered the list to stay English! So please don't put words in my mouth. > > How difficult is that? > > Extremely. My brain is wired for one editor, using anything else > requires concious thought. I prefer to waste my brainpower on the content, > not on fighting with my editor. Very well then. But I find it very strange that as an Hebrew-speaking Israeli living in Israel you don't want to be able to at least be able to read (if not write) emails in Hebrew. I know that in several occasions (work, social occasions, etc.) I *had* to read and write Hebrew emails, and being able to do that on the Solaris server I use (nothing I mentioned is Linux-specific!) and my Linux machine came in very handy. > I DON'T WANT TO WRITE IN HEBREW. Is that hard to understand? No, but why is it so hard to understand that other people (myself NOT included, so don't blaim me) DO want to write in Hebrew? If you don't want to read what they write, then so be it. The only legitimate reason I can see to request people not to write in Hebrew when they prefer to do so is because some of this list's members do not understand Hebrew at all (be they foreigners, immigrants, Arabs, Iranians, or any other English-speaker that has always been welcome here). This is one of the reasons I prefer this list to stay officially English. Another reason is that it is simply more convenient for me to write in English (in reading, both languages are equally convenient for me). > > I occasionally write and read Hebrew emails, and it's not hard. > > For you. And so it will be for you, if you wanted (I know you a bit, you're not as stupid as you are pretending to be :)). If you don't want - well, than that's ok - nobody will force you to read these Hebrew messages. But next time your boss, girlfriend, friend, or who-knows-who sends you a personal email in Hebrew and your system isn't set up to read them or reply - you'll be sorry. > > I'd personally prefer to > > continue writing on the English list (but I don't mind reading both). > > And read crossposted threads twice? Oh, now, I forget, you'll just hack > your procmail. Well, wooptedoo, some of us have better things to do > then fiddle with our e-mail. Crossposted? Do you mean somebody will actually go ahead and translate messages? No, I don't think this would happen. People will not be allowed to post Hebrew messages to the English list and vice versa (how exactly to do that technically is something that should be considered). > > As a sidenote, one of the best ways to get people to work on Hebrew support > > is to "make" them need to use it, see how inconvenient it is and want to fix > > it. > > Oh, this is a great way to push your agenda. Yeah, force people to write > Hebrew support. Force newbies to learn how to install it. I don't think > you understand the point of free software -- you want it, *you* write it. > Not, you want it, you use politics to cause other people to write it. > I've got an idea for you -- crack linux all day. This will *make* those > pesky people do code audits of linux, right? Boy, are you crabby today ;) First of all Hebrew isn't "my agenda", it's simply a language I (and everyone around me) speak and I would find it convenient (but not necessary) to be able to use it on my computer too. Second, you apparently did not understand what I meant, because I completely agree with you on the free software issue. You don't write free software or patch existing free software unless you're personally interested in some new feature. But how do you get interested in some feature? It happens when some real-life concerns make you get interested in them. For example, when you need to write a 100 page thesis in Hebrew and the existing LaTeX Hebrew implementation is completely broken and fix it. Or when you need to read or write email to/from a friend who is not fluent in Hebrew, and suddenly realise that a simple utility to do bidi conversion on plain text is missing. Or when you want to know the Hebrew date and notice the program you used stopped working in the year 2000. These are things that actually happened to me. The more people programmers will start to run across the Hebrew annoyances, the better the chance that one of them will decide to do something about it. When a better organized and funded organization (such as QT, Pango, ISOC-IL or even IBM) runs across these problems, they are even more likely to do something about these issues - which is how we've seen the excellent Hebrew support solutions from IBM (Mozilla and OpenOffice), QT/KDE (today I read an Hebrew icq message in licq on Redhat 7.3, for the first time in my life), Pango/Gnome, and maybe others I left out. > > This is how/why I worked on my version of the LaTeX 2.09 Hebrew support, > > for example - the Technion forced me to write my MSc thesis in Hebrew (the > > rules have since changed, and people can write in English now). > > See? Easier to get the rules changed. Are you kidding? "the rules" is that (I'm estimating) 85% of the Israeli population is fluent in Hebrew, and (say) 30% of the Israeli population is fluent in (not just knows some basic) English. So you're never be able to escape needing to use Hebrew for some of your communications with other Israelis. And unless you want to have a second Windows computer to do these things (like write a letter to your bank, do your income tax forms, etc. etc.), you'd need to be able to do those things on your Linux. Even in the Technion, it was impossible to get that rule changed. The dean of graduate students was a Hebrew language fanatic, so he made a rule that all students (with exceptions made for people who don't know Hebrew) MUST write their thesis in Hebrew. There was noting I could do about this rule. This rule not only meant I had to fix latex 2.09 Hebrew support - it also meant I couldn't share my MSc thesis with other researchers abroad, and it meant I had to translate some material I had previously written in English into Hebrew. So this rule sucked - but it was a rule. A rule like which you're likely to encounter in the real world. > > Anyway, to make myself clear: I'll vote for an additional Hebrew list, > > but for keeping also the existing English list. > > Great. "Where do I send my question?" "Both, once in Hebrew, once > in English". Which one will you answer? both? crosspost the answer? Only time will tell. It is possible that the lists' population will split (e.g., experts on the English list, newbies on the Hebrew), but it is also possible that everybody will be on both lists, answering questions in the same language they were posed (this would have to be a rule, otherwise you'd need to translate the question!) - and only people who can't read one of the languages (for linguistic or software reasons) will miss out on some of the threads. It is also possible that the Hebrew list will be half-dead for a long period because nobody will want to use it. Only trying will tell. -- Nadav Har'El | Saturday, May 18 2002, 7 Sivan 5762 [EMAIL PROTECTED] |----------------------------------------- Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Communism is the equal distribution of http://nadav.harel.org.il |poverty. ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
