On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:55:08 +0100 (CET), Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
For the record: I care nothing for the rpm file name.
The rpm file name is at the frontier. It is displayed to the user by the installer, by package tools, and it may need to be input at the command-line or in graphical apps.
Nope. You intentionally keep confusing the [...]
I disagree, and I see we don't discuss the same things. Perhaps you're on a mission.
I don't care about what names people give their software, whether they design shiny logos with glyphs that are unknown to me.
I don't care if they don't publish any web pages and documentation in a language I don't understand. If they don't want to be multi-lingual, that's not my problem.
I don't care whether there is a software package in the Fedora repository that uses only languages I don't understand, provided that it is not in a default install or otherwise tied into the system.
What I do care about is that the Linux distribution is not subverted with languages and glyphs I don't understand or can't display. I also very much care about the project language that is used on the primary mailing-lists, for example.
What would happen during package review with an application that is completely in German without any English message object files?
It would be accepted. Period. As long as [...]
Why did you continue after the "Period"? Is it so difficult to answer a question without adding presumptions? There is no reason to fight attempts at trying to understand the problems and the goal.
If you can't understand an app you don't have to install it.
Only if this is my decision actually. You say "an app", but realistically it could also be a library with a -devel package that finds its way into a dependency-chain (or even the buildroot) and contront users/packagers with no choice.
What do you think langpacks and dictionnaries are? They're locale-specific Fedora components that can be totally uncomprehensible and useless to English-only speakers.
Haven't you payed attention to my question about i17n/m17n/l10n?
I have the feeling that at first the door for package names with multi-byte characters is opened, and as a
next
step, file names in packages will use multi-byte characters, too.
This ship has sailed long ago and our official policy already explicitely allows this. In fact it goes further: filenames MUST be UTF-8, so a latin-1 filename that goes beyond the core latin subset common to UTF-8 and latin-1 is forbidden.
Any ship can be sunk.
The factual argument being?
It's the reply to your "The ship has sailed long ago", and the argument is in the following sentence:
A policy can be revisited/refined, because non-ASCII glyphs in file names are a problem in a default setup that doesn't display them correctly and that requires extra efforts to enter them.
These are bugs to be fixed.
So, the system is not ready yet, which is a blocker criterion as I pointed out before.
We already ship lots of code commented in other languages than English (for example, OO.o IIRC) so this ship also sailed a long time ago.
That's still only due to its Star Office history, isn't it?
No.
That's due to the fact Fedora is a *distribution*, built from [...]
When Star Division developed the closed-source Star Office, Fedora did not even exist.
With your logic OpenOffice.org would have no place in Fedora.
??? Now your confusion is complete. Please don't put words into my mouth. You don't know my "logic" yet.
Stomping on other people naming choices is utter disrespect. That's not how you build an healthy FLOSS community.
Ah, come on, this has nothing to do with disrespect. We already strip upstream tarballs and exclude certain stuff from it, because only parts of a product are compatible with our project policies. We disable features, we patch some things completely. Transliterating project names into characters from a limited package name alphabet is a matter of usability and technical concerns. The primary spins default to American English, with the translations only being secondary and as the translation project resources permit.