On Sun, May 19, 2002, Ely Levy wrote about "Re: official hebrew in Linux-IL mailing
lists?":
> month work????
> maybe if you work full time on it day by day..
> if you know how do tell me I would be more than happy to do it
Ok. How about the following idea: make a (say) Redhat 7.3 based Hebrew
distribution to called "Redhat Ivrix 1.0", "Redhat 7.3 with Hebrew",
"LinBrew", or whatever, like this:
1. Take the stock Redhat 7.3. This already includes some Hebrew fonts,
and full Hebrew support in Mozilla, QT (e.g., Licq, KDE stuff).
Some things are still buggy: this will be solved in the next release.
2. Add an RPM of Hebrew Open Office. Voila, we have a WYSIWYG editor for
the joy of the newbies.
3. Add RPMs which will somehow cause the users to default to
LC_CTYPE=he_IL, or en_US.utf8, or something like that, set the
appropriate keyboard (English/Hebrew, no support for a third language
in this release for simplicity) map by default, set mutt (and pine,
etc. etc.) to work well with Hebrew, and so on.
4. Add a few more RPMs for available Hebrew software: fribidi, bidiv,
hdate/taarich, etc. If we can find a few more free Hebrew fonts to
stick in there, do it (I think we have at least the Elmar fonts).
Add a HOWTO on how to use Microsoft's Hebrew font on another partition.
5. If you feel brave, also add an RPM for Hebrew TeX, some very initial
(read: worthless) Hebrew spell checker, etc.
6. Maybe add an antiword RPM. It's not Hebrew-specific, but somehow it
seems Israelis need this a lot...
7. If still have time in the month, try translating a few important HowTos,
READMEs, or best of all: the Redhat installation software. Translate
a few manual pages.
8. If you really have time to waste, draw special Israeli backgrounds,
logos, and things like that.
What we get from this is a rudementary version of Hebrew Linux. People
could install this (either you get special CD-ROMs with these RPMs, or you
install them on top of a preinstalled RedHat system) and get some Hebrew
support out-of-the-box on their Linux system.
Some of the support will be buggy, some will be missing, and most of the
system isn't translated yet. These things can be imporved upon in the next
versions, if this is a continuing project (with RPM specs available) and
not some one-time special Hebrew CD-ROM (like Tzafrir has done a few times
in the past).
I think that though people who don't know a word of English would not be
able to use such an initial version, more "ordinary" people, people who know
some English but are not comfortable with it, will be able to "endure" this
version if some expert (or English speaker) helps them install the system
initially.
I have started working on this yesterday, but it's going very slowly because
my knowledge of RPM building really sucks. I failed to even create an RPM
of the sourforge fribidi even though it contains a spec file (yes, I'm
stupid :( I'm trying to learn though).
Tzafrir, you are undoubtedly our RPM expert. You did some specs and srpms
previously. Where are they? Can we update them to the latest versions of
stuff and collect a set of RPMs to make an initial Hebrew Linux release?
Does anybody else think that this might be a good way to proceed? Or maybe
it isn't? (see also the P.S.'s below before you answer) I'd like comments,
and better yet: people willing to help me build RPMS :)
P.S. The reason I'm suggesting Redhat 7.3 is because I personally use it and
like it (and trust it), because it's cutting-edge enough to contain some new
Hebrew features, and because it's a common distribution. I suppose the
same thing can be done to Mandrake, Gentoo, Slackware, Debian, or whatever.
I hope that the same SRPMs created for Redhat 7.3 could be used for Mandrake,
but I don't know. Tzafrir?
P.S.#2:
Of course, when I say a month work I assume someone who has time to work on
this night after night for a month. I unforunately have a few other things
on my mind too :(
P.S.#3:
Basing such an effort on an existing distribution (such as Redhat 7.3 in
my example) is very important in my opinion. Distributions have some huge
burdons and responsibilities, not the least of which is to do timely releases
of fixes in case of security problems, and I don't think we can, or want to
duplicate these efforts. A new version of (say) Wu-FTPD coming out has nothing
to do with Hebrew support, so we shouldn't even touch that package.
In the future, we should strive to have most of these things integrated with
(again, for example) the official RedHat release. If (say) fribidi and hdate
are important to Israeli users, I bet they won't mind adding a package or
a few for us, like they already have huge packages for other countries and
even Hebrew.
--
Nadav Har'El | Sunday, May 19 2002, 9 Sivan 5762
[EMAIL PROTECTED] |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Despite the cost of living, have you
http://nadav.harel.org.il |noticed how it remains so popular?
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