Do we need policy changes?
Hello,
I really don't know how to express what I want to say :) It has come
to my mind a few days ago when the Vera fonts were released to public.
My problem was: everybody was acting like mad, screaming "at last,
some good fonts for linux!", whereas, as far as I remember, these
fonts lacks many many scripts, starting with the simpliest ones like
Cyrillic. I don't even want to mention double-width characters. The
same with some GPL'ed fonts release newly (don't remember the name,
something starting with a 'd') - nothing except latin1. Same with
otherwise excellent Knoppix-CD (OK, it's not a Debian release, but a good
example of not caring about i18n and l10n): if you start it with the
Russian interface, the fonts are plain ugly - nothing was made to
ensure anti-aliasing for example.
What I think about is some regulated way to care about the needs of
international debian users. Let's take an example: some
programmplays badly along with UTF-8 and therefore can't be properly
used by me, as I need e.g. both German and Russian. I can as well file
a bug against it, but it wouldn't matter much, as the maintainer would
just say 'it's not supported upstream' and nothing would happen. Other
situation would arise, if something like interoperability in different
language environments had been (I'm just speculating) a part of Debian
Policy. In that case, package at least could have been marked as
'non-functioning under non-latin circumstances' and this could
possibly lead to exclusion from Debian, or separating it into a
diffenrent part of debian (like non-US is) etc. This way, a possible
user could be warned in advance and maybe lead to the break-through
for Unicode.
Thank you for your time, and you want to tell me I'm paranoid, don't
bother, it is not worth your time :) Better tell me what I might have
missed in the observing the subject.
--
Nikolai Prokoschenko
nikolai@prokoschenko.de / Jabber: pronik@jabber.org
Reply to: