Fedora 18 issues with translations and keymaps

[Jiri Eischmann]

Adam Williamson píše v Čt 03. 01. 2013 v 00:03 -0800:
> Hey, folks. I'm not really sure how to frame it, but the result of all
> my poking about at keyboard layout bugs and related stuff recently is
> that I'm pretty sad at the state of support for
> anything-but-U.S.-English in Fedora 18.
> 
> Here's the tally:
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=889562 - systemd
> conversion from xkb to console layouts fails probably more than it
> succeeds, when it does, you wind up with U.S. English as your console
> layout, not whatever you picked during installation
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891487 - anaconda doesn't
> seem to manage to offer all the keyboard layouts it could do, and some
> of the ones it's missing are somewhat important
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891489 - anaconda's
> mapping of 'native' layouts to user's chosen install language doesn't
> work in all cases
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=878433 (?) - GNOME has a
> weird predilection for coming up with the obscure 'Bambara' layout in
> user sessions after an install in a non-English language, but not the
> correct layout for that language
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=881624 - X and GNOME
> keyboard layouts revert to U.S. English on upgrade to F18
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=854557 - the 'layout
> testing' in the keyboard spoke doesn't work at all how you'd expect it
> to
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=882440 - in fact, people
> have various problems interacting with and understanding the keyboard
> spoke at all, really. Several of the issues discussed in this bug are
> 'greatest hits', especially the lack of a default layout switch command,
> the fact that anaconda doesn't automatically start using a layout you
> promote to the top of the list, and the lack of any kind of indicator in
> anaconda as to what layout is in use
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=859641 - we're picking the
> wrong default keyboard for Dutch, apparently
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=867110 - ...and German
> (Switzerland)
> 
> * https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=885345 - ...and Dutch
> (Belgian)
> 
> (there's a few more along those lines which I won't bore anyone with)
> 
> In addition to those bugs, we have fairly significant regressions in the
> completeness of anaconda translations between Fedora 16 and Fedora 18
> (the numbers for F17 for some languages are weird - a lot of languages
> show 55% completion for F17 but 90-100% for F16, which seems bogus, as
> I'm sure things didn't change that much between F16 and F17, so I'm just
> using the F16 numbers. I assume there's some weirdness that explains the
> odd 55% numbers for F17, but if not, hey, F17 was kinda boned too...):
> 
> Language		F16		F18
> Finnish			93%		75%
> Indonesian		100%		33%
> Kannada			94%		33%
> Oriya			94%		27%
> Telugu			94%		32%
> Bengali (India)		93%		33%
> Portuguese		100%		36%
> Persian			95%		27%
> Malayalam		78%		20%
> NorwegianBokmal		92%		55%
> Bengali			93%		33%
> Sinhala			93%		27%
> Serbian			81%		23%
> Serbian(Latin)		81%		23%
> Hebrew			83%		22%
> Catalan			68% (98% F17)	25%
> Latvian			88%		20%
> Greek			68%		21%
> Turkish			79%		21%
> Maithili		67%		18%
> Asturian		85%		24%
> 
> (from https://fedora.transifex.com/projects/p/anaconda/ )
> 
> There are several others around the 50-70% complete mark for F16, too, I
> just cut off at 67%. It's a fairly long list of languages for which we
> previously had tolerably complete translation coverage, but we now have
> a level which isn't really usable: basically these languages have gone
> from 'covered' in at least F16 (probably F17 too) to 'not covered' in
> F18. I want to stress I'm not blaming anyone for this: I don't see how
> it could be otherwise, the problem is the huge amount of string churn
> caused by newUI, I'm actually more amazed at how many languages _do_
> have close-to-100% translations for F18 than how many _don't_, given the
> conditions. It's just an unfortunate thing.
> 
> anaconda does not list every available translation for the user to
> choose from, but I cannot figure out for the life of me how the decision
> about which to display is made: it's not that very incomplete
> translations are left out, as plenty of very incomplete translations
> (including most of the above) are shown. If we filtered out very
> incomplete translations we might at least look a bit less silly, but we
> don't seem to be doing that. Our language selection screen is definitely
> writing checks that our translations can't cash :)
> 
> I don't really know where we need to go with this, exactly, but a few
> questions arise naturally:
> 
> 1. In the short term, is the combination of all these factors enough for
> us to want to delay F18 further to try and make things suck less?
> 
> 2. If not, do we want to engage in some Messaging around the F18 release
> to emphasize that we know there are all these issues and we'll try to
> smooth things out for F19?
> 
> 3. In the longer term, how can we get anaconda, i18n, systemd, GNOME etc
> folks all pointed in the same direction and working so that there's far
> less suckage and far more smooth interaction going on here? Should we
> try and run some sort of session at FUDCon?

I'm a reporter one of these bugs and I reported one more related to
keyboard layouts. However, I don't think my bugs should be show
stoppers.
I'm for the solution #2. We're very close to the final release which
already has a huge delay. As much I'd love to have all the language and
layout mess solved, I don't think it's the right time to start solving
it. I appreciate the job the QA teams is doing and quality of Fedora has
improved a lot due to you, guys, but Fedora is not Debian Stable or
RHEL.
More and more people are using F18 although it hasn't been released and
more and more of them wonder why we are delaying it if it's working and
it does work by Fedora standards (I've been using F18 on two machines
for some time and I think it might be the most quality release ever,
already).
So yes, these issues are serious, but IMHO rather a long-term problem we
should focus on after releasing F18.

Jiri