On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 12:29:19PM +0100, Stefan Sperling wrote: > On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 09:55:01AM +0000, Creamy wrote: > > Are you suggesting to add individual locales as and when a significant > > number of translations exist in ports, (good idea), or to select a > > few South-American dialects to represent the whole continent, (very > > bad idea)? > > A mix of the two. I don't want to make technical decisions based > on politics.
Agreed. > I'd like to recognize and fix situations where people > are missing functionality from the system because their language > of choice is not represented properly. It's not a black and white > decision, it's a trade-off. Agreed - as pointed out in a previous message in this thread, for the time being, more benefit would come from improving es_ES. Any Spanish speaker who doesn't understand English would benefit significantly from this, and in any case, they are in the best position to provide us with a further translation for their local dialect. > Also, I think that extending the locale implementation (such as > adding support for LC_TIME, LC_COLLATE, etc) is much more important > at this stage than adding additional files to /usr/share/locale. Yes. > > There is often more difference between South-American dialects of > > Spanish than between any one of them and Castillian Spanish. How would > > you decide which country is going to represent the whole of the continent? > > That's a tough question, and I really don't mean to alienate people > who speak any of these dialects. But I'd like to avoid the situation > where typing the name of a locale is something that people associate > with their own identity. Because then, there would be no reason at > all to stop adding more locales until the /usr filesystem is full. I strongly agree here... > Systems like Debian ask their users to generate some selection of > locales during the installation process. I don't think it is a good > idea to ask users to make that kind of choice during system installation. > But it's a consequence of the fact that Debian has too many locales. ... and here ... > > > No offence, but to me, the name of a locale is just... a name. > > > Let's try to make useful functional changes to the system. > > > Adding locales for purely patriotic reasons seems like a waste of time > > > to me. > > > > I agree, especially as there will always be awkward individuals like me > > who live in one country, but speak mostly foreign languages, and use > > date formats and keyboard layouts which don't correspond to any standard > > locale either for the country they reside in, or the foreign languages > > they speak. > > Exactly. I'm a native speaker of German, but learned a significant > amount of English in Ireland during my teenage years forcing me to > slowly recover some chunks of my memory of German when I got back. > All my computers speak English to me and I speak English to them, > whether or not people around me speak German to me. I type on a US > keyboard (cannot type on German ones for the life of me), and prefer > to read dates with days given before months because that is what I'm > used to. > > My preferred personal locale would probably be called something > like en_IE_de_DE_kbd_US.UTF-8. ... for that exact reason! I think that there are broadly two types of people who are interested in internationalisation - those who are monolingual and only speak a language other than English, and those who work in mixed environments on a regular basis. Each group will have different views on what is a priority and what isn't. If you have ever been asked to type Spanish on a badly configured Japanese keyboard, on an old version of Windows NT which doesn't allow any real customisation of the keymap, you will understand. (Amasingly, typing Japanese on the keyboard was easy, despite it being mis-configured, as it was handled by a proprietary userland application). > > It only makes sense to add them if there is a real intention to use > > them. Why not just add individual locales as and when a significant number > > of translations exist in ports, as it gives people an incentive to translate > > in to their local language. > > I'd like to avoid making up a set of rules about when new locales can be > added. I think we should discuss this on a case-by-case basis, and allow > people who are genuinely missing functionality to make their case. Sure, but obviously the existance of a large number of translations adds weight to their case. -- Creamy
