On Sun, 19 May 2002, Nadav Har'El wrote: > 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.
I haven't followed Reedhat closely for a while. I know that Mandrake's installer already has quite a few hooks in place to support other lanages. You probably won't have to touch a line of the (perl, in case of Mandrake, python in case of redhat) installer, and only edit the config files. > 2. Add an RPM of Hebrew Open Office. Voila, we have a WYSIWYG editor for > the joy of the newbies. OpenOffice is an overkill for that. KDE3/gnome2 will give you that. OpenOffice will give you a (Marketoid speak) "World class word-processor, now finally with Hebrew support on Linux" > 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. Again: Mandrake's installer already does that, if you choose "Israel" installation. I'm not sure about redhat. Some difaults may have to be re-visited. For instance: the fact that Mandrake 8.1 defaluted to loading KDE2 with the charset ISO-8859-8, and KDE happily crashed because of that. > 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. IMHO it is important, because it is needed for LyX. > 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. Try thinking about what the user encounters first. Start with the short introduction docs on the CD. > 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. On-top? Or a seperate CD? Changing configuration after install time is a whole lot trickier, and requires some smarter scriptig and more testing. > 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? I figure. I haven't yet studied debian's sutability. > > 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, weshould 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 hugepackages for other countries and > even Hebrew. Yes, it takes a bit longer, but the safest root is to push it to the distros themselves. -- Tzafrir Cohen mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir ================================================================= 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]
