Chris Knadle wrote:
On Saturday 28 August 2010 19:30:45 Ron Guerin wrote:
Chris Knadle wrote:
...
My girlfriend Criss uses this URL shortener, which she seems happy with.
It's in PHP and uses MySQL for the DB backend.
http://yourls.org/
At the moment I don't think there's any URL shortener within Debian
AFAIK.
I'm trying to re-write mine to be less horrible code and to take into
account some reasonable feature requests I've gotten, like translation
files. I'd be honored if it somehow got into Debian after that,
although I thought they had higher standards than anything I produce.
As far as I know (disclaimer: I *do not* have direct experience in this area),
there are basically three things to consider when trying to get a project
uploaded to distributions:
A) marking a particular version of the software as "stable" [important]
B) software code portability for other architectures
C) support for localization [i.e. l10n written language translation]
A) is most important, as Debian packagers typically will only package software
versions that are marked as "stable". This is the part that can annoy
software authors, as it means what is packaged might be somewhat old. From
the package management point of view, the packager wants to know that the
software has been tested and works, i.e. "stable". After the software is
packaged it is then first uploaded to Debian Sid, also known as "Debian
Unstable". So ironically this generally means that only "stable" software
gets uploaded to "Unstable".
This may be an issue. The code I run and distribute now has been marked
"alpha" for about six years now. lol I'm primarily though maintaining
this branch of what is production code and hoping to move forward with a
cleaner, faster re-writing. ([*] I know Joel says this is bad, but I
doubt Joel was thinking about hack hobbyists)
B) can be important as distributions support many architectures -- and it
would be nice if the software produced would, say, work on an ARM-based laptop
or mobile device. In practice what happens is an auto-builder daemon is used
on the software package, and if the package fails to build for a particular
architecture then the software simply isn't made available for that
architecture.
I am fortunate in this regard to be distributing
architecture-independent code.
C) is important because distributions support a lot of written languages.
UTF-8 unicode support is important too, as it's the default LOCALE upon
installation at least for Debian. A friend of mine using a Mac recently had
trouble with this concerning the 'tr' command to translate carriage-returns to
line-feed characters. He did the following, which was very logical and should
have worked:
$ cat funky_lines.csv | tr '\r' '\n' > fixed_lines.csv
However the file he was modifying contained UTF-8 characters, and the 'รถ'
characters [that's an 'o' with two dots above it] cause the 'tr' command on OS
X to die with an error of 'illegal character' because it apparently isn't
UTF-8 aware. Oops. [The 'tr' command on Debian /is/ UTF-8 aware, BTW.]
My recollection is PHP is not particularly good at handling UTF-8. But
that said, all other PHP scripts in Debian will have the same
limitations I do.
Obviously you cannot do the written language translation yourself to all of
the languages that a distribution might support -- it's just important to put
in /support/ for translations so that someone else can translate the strings.
Several of my users (I mean the people who install my code), have
requested translation support and offered translations, and it's the
most requested thing after the API, so I'm planning on supporting
translations at least.
I've dealt with translations in Qt using the 'tr' macro wrapper around
strings, but I'm not sure how localization is typically handled in, say,
C/C++, bash, Python, etc in an architecture-generic way.
This is how I'm handling it:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gettext/gettext.html
https://launchpad.net/php-gettext/
Oversimplifying...
<?php
echo _("Hello World!");
?>
This looks up the localized text for "Hello World!" in the translation
file and echos the translated text.
http://mel.melaxis.com/devblog/2005/08/06/localizing-php-web-sites-using-gettext/
I realize you probably have no interest in the PHP bits of this, but I'm
putting it all here in case it's of some use to someone else. When I
first looked into this, it was not at all clear to me how exactly a GPL
program ought to do this in PHP.
- Ron
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