On 04/01/2016 10:50 AM, Max Reitz wrote: > In its organizational structure, the qemu project is rather > decentralized: Many different maintainers manage their own more or less > secluded subsystems. However, regarding languages, it is still rather > anglo-centric. > > This issue has been brought up multiple times in regards to user-visible > output such as error messages and has unfortunately generally been > dismissed, except for some UIs. > > Development always flows from the developer community to the user. Our > developer community is just as diverse (or at least I hope it is) as our > user base. Therefore, we should reflect this diversity in our > development process in order for this diversity to reach our users as > well, so they can benefit from it. > > The human-targeted part of that development process are comments in the > source code, obviously. Thus, in order to exhibit qemu's diversity, it > makes sense for each subsystem's comments to be translated into the > maintainer's native language. > > Unfortunately, I do not speak Swabian. > > However, as a submaintainer under Kevin, I think it will be fine to > translate the comments into German, as that is supposedly a language we > both share. > > I'm certain that this will not hamper development itself by much. First > of all, many other developers in the block area are able to speak > German: Markus Armbruster, Stefan Hajnoczi, Peter Lieven, Stefan Weil, > just to name a few. > > Second, good code is supposed to be self-explanatory, i.e. without > reading the comments. While it should go without saying that the block > layer's code quality is simply marvelous, we can now proof that it > indeed is, by seeing whether people who cannot speak German can still > understand the code. > > (Although some of our code is rumored to be rather hard to understand > even with the comments. But those rumors are purely unfounded, I am > sure.) > > In the rather improbable event that someone is not able to understand > the code without being able to read the comments, they will then need to > learn German. So this is fine, too. > > Third, this will surely attract a wave of German developers who were so > far unable to participate in qemu's development because of the language > barrier. In order to facilitate this process, the next step will be to > use German commit messages for every commit in the block layer and to > allow German variable names. > > I am sure if all maintainers follow this process of translating their > subsystem's comments, variable names and string contents into their > native language, qemu will become a shining example of what we call > „Kraut und Rüben“. And everyone knows how much the Krauts like Kraut. > > Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <[email protected]>
Acked-by: John Snow <[email protected]> As a follow-up, please consider translating the legacy block devices so some right-minded developers will be able to understand what's going on inside of them, because I sure as hell don't. TIA --js
