On 24.08.2011 16:59, Sebastien Bacher wrote: > > Thank you for your interest but confrontational behaviour based on > subjective facts doesn't usually lead to useful discussions...
This is not about leading to useful discussions. This is about leading to solving the problem. Unfortunately, my experiences of the last years with ubuntu maintainers teach that being confrontational has the highest probability of getting a bug/problem fixed, while beeing friendly usually results in beeing ignored - or beeing told that I have no clue and that things should be as the maintainer arbitrarily decided. So beeing confrontational is simply a result of game theoretical optimiziation. What does that tell about ubuntu maintainers? >> obvious that this guy has an awful anglo-americo-centric view of the >> world, not knowing much about multilanguage environments, and >> rigorously enforces his wrong assumptions. > Could you read http://www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct those are not the > basis for a constructive discussion. Just for the record most of the > desktop team people are non english speakers and contributed to the > discussions Yep. But from what I read so far from this mailing discussion and a bug discussion, most people involved were pleading for leaving the options in the login screen. However, their way of beeing friendly proved to be completely without success. What's the point in doing it the same way? On the other hand, Robert aggressively pushes assumptions in the discussion without accepting any other opinions. It has become a typical attitude of ubuntu maintainers that they demand to be treated like princesses, while they themselves are treating others rather harsh and aggressively. Most ubuntu maintainers ignore the standards of behaviour and respect the way they often treat bug reports. I am under the strong impression that this permant demand for decency and friendlyness is in fact an attempt to keep as much critics as possible ignorable. Being confrontative is a result of how ubuntu maintainers are treating users these days. (And I am using Unix and open source for more than 25 years, Linux and Debian from its very beginnings, that's what I compare Ubuntu with.) > >> 1. Users who set the system language at install/first boot >> time, and >> never change it (the vast majority) >> 2. English as a second language users, who switch between >> their native >> language and English (this is a class of user I don't >> understand well). >> I think the reason for this is because the translations are >> not always >> good enough? Is this a power user feature? >> >> These are wrong assumptions. It shows that you do not really know much >> about language and locale settings. Maybe not the best base for such >> important design decisions. > Rather than saying they are wrong could you argument on why you think > they are wrong? When and why do you switch locales? It seems most non > english users just run using their own locale and doesn't switch over > what english user do. Sure I can (although you don't seem to expect Robert to tell why he believes these assumptions are correct). I even thought I'd have told that in the list of 11 points. They are wrong in the sense, that they don't meet reality. (of course, there are different perceptions of „wrong” , but I chose that base on my experience). I do switch locales quite often: * Sometimes I am tired of german localization, because german translations are most often odd and in most cases incomplete. ironically, oneiric itselfs warns the user when installing from the alternate CD and choosing german, that this is not a good idea, since it is incomplete. With german error messages you are completely lost when trying to report a bug or finding a solution, since almost all descriptions, workarounds, etc. tell the english error message. So whenever trying to fix/report a bug, I always have to change to the english locale. German is a lengthy language. A german translation of an english text is usually about 30-50% longer. This breaks some graphical user interfaces. And it is rather difficult to use two programs together, where one uses english and one german terms. However, if you take the low level (windows-like) user into consideration, who never ever reports or analyzes bugs, their need to change to english locales is lower. * Some programs simply don't work correctly in german. Not even apt-get install until recently. It usually asks "Do you want to continue [Y/n]?", but in german "Möchten Sie fortfahren [J/n]?", because Yes in german is Ja. But since only the question, but not parsing the answer had been localized, many programs simply don't work. There are still programs, which cannot deal with file names containing german (i.e. non-ASCII) characters or use the correct character set (ISO-8859 or UTF). Since Ubuntu gives the default directores (Desktop, Public) german names like Arbeitsfläche, Öffentlich, plenty of trouble can be expected. Some programs do not use these localized names and always expect directories like ~/Desktop. Furthermore, this makes it really difficult to synchronize files between two computers standing in different areas. There is more trouble. Some shell scripts or other programs do parse the output of other programs. Recently I had trouble because a program was trying to parse the output of /bin/ls, but failed, since the output differs under the german locale. E.g. /bin/ls without or with us locale can output drwxr-xr-x 3 hadmut hadmut 4096 Jan 2 2011 Calendar while the same with the german locale looks like drwxr-xr-x 3 hadmut hadmut 4096 2011-01-02 14:01 Calendar The US time format is 3.00 pm, while it is 15:00 here, and the us number 1,234.00 equals the german 1.234,00 Some things don't work with the english, others don't work with the german locale. * I do not have a „constantly preferred language”. My language is not like a gender which I usually do not change daily or weekly. Although german is my first language and my english is not as good as it should be, I prefer to use english for all technical matters. I sometimes travel around the world or are on business trips, where I have to speak english. It is much easier to remain english in this time than swapping between two languages, e.g. talk english to people and use my laptop in german. Therefore, I do quite often prefer english, especially when doing technical work or travelling. * While I usually prefer english messages with german date and time format (i.e. I do mix the locale components), I need to use a german locale when giving support to german users, since they do report their problems in german. On the other hand, when reporting bugs upstream, I use the english locale, because I need to see the english error messages (and check wether the problem occurs in the german locale settings only, which happens quite often). * When using office programs (oowriter, oocalc) for german applications, I urgently need german locales, since programs like oocalc (open office spread sheet) simply does not display dates, numbers, and currencies correctly without the german locale. * I sometimes exchange data with or do remote management for some older Unix machines, e.g. Debian, which do not yet use UTF-8, but ISO-8859-1. In contrast to english, where all characters are taken from the ASCII set, it makes a severe difference in german, whether you have UTF or ISO-8859-1 character sets. I therefore do not only change between german and english, but between ISO and UTF as well. > Why do you need to switch languages? Don't you have a prefered one you > use most of the time? No. See above. First of all, I do not have a prefered one. Of course, my first language is german, and my german is much better than my english. And "most of the time" I do speak(!) german. But then, for technical matters and as a computer scientist, I do prefer english for this sort of stuff, especially when cooperating in an international environment. And for many applications, I do prefer english output and error messages, simply because the german translations are quite often odd, ridiculous, or simply wrong, at least unusual. In many cases the english menus and terms are much easier to understand. It is sometimes really difficult to find a menu entry if you have to guess how a maintainer might have translated this into german. German quite often gives more options to name things than english. And when talking to english speaking people, it is really difficult to translate this back. E.g. if an ubuntu program gave a german error message which I then translate back to english, it most probably does not match the original english message. Although I prefer a split locale with english messages and german date, time, number formats „most of the time”, this does not mean that I would not have to change this periodically. Another problem is that I usually prefer the Gnome desktop, which is getting worse. I then tried Ubuntu Unity, and on older machines use XFCE. Then I use both the last LTS version and the current ubuntu version. So I would have to remember about 5-6 different methods to set the locale under these desktops? Horrible. Your assumption that one has a preferred locale setting that he (almost) always uses simply does not hold true. Ironically, Ubuntu is far from beeing usable with the german locale permanently, or with the us locale in Germany. > > What you suggest is that users need to change their "location" and > "default dictionnary" there, not the langage used for the ui of the > softwares. If you do like changing default languages every now and then > you can probably do it fine from the language selector, log out and log > in again, it's basically not harder than doing it on the login screen. It is much harder for four reasons: 1. The way of changing the locale in the Desktop changes too often between ubuntu versions and desktops (e.g. ubuntu now comes with unity, where it isn't trivial to just open a terminal, if not being used to. Ubuntu expects users to move from Gnome to Unity, but most settings are not possible under unity, and then difficult to find. ) 2. Using a desktop (even if just for changing the locale) can become difficult if not impossible if the locale or the keyboard setting is wrong. Setting these values /after /starting the desktop is just illogical. In Germany we have lots of people who do not speak english. How should these people find the method to change the locale to german if everything is in english? The whole idea of setting the locale in the desktop is broken by design. 3. Meanwhile desktops are so overloaded with crap that it takes quite long to get them up. 4. What if the locale is wrong and keeps the Desktop from getting up? deadlock... > > The text editor let you pick the format and dictionary. Oh yeah, let ubuntu maintainers do their weird ideas and burden the users to deal with it... As I said before, this does not always work. oocalc does not work correclty if started with the wrong locale, whatever options you pick. The assumption is wrong that every program lets you pick the format, dictionary,... > What you need > there is rather a way to start one application in a specific context. Partly wrong. I need to start the Desktop in a context. And context is the precise word describing that it must come from outside. > > Your arguments explain why people need to change some of their settings, > not why that needs to happen on the login screen itself directly. Note > that GNOME dropped the language selector from gdm as well. > That's why they got a harsh bug report as well. Just because GNOME dropped it, that does not make anything better. Wasn't it the reason for ubuntu to change from Gnome to Unity because Gnome went the wrong way? And, btw., I explained this, one reason was the completeness to cover all programs run under the session and not just those run under the desktop. But cutting away my argument and then claiming I would not explain is impertinent. Let's come back to your argument of paying respect: You've asked my for plenty of reasons and explanations. On the other hand, I did not yet see any good argument for changing this details (as I did not see any good reasons for most of the changes of the last two ubuntu releases.) What good reason is there to take the options away from the login screen?
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