Re: Editor Priorities
Hi,
At Thu, 9 May 2002 00:18:09 -0500,
Branden Robinson wrote:
>
> [1 <text/plain; us-ascii (quoted-printable)>]
> On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 11:20:14AM +0900, Tomohiro KUBOTA wrote:
> > Note that summation of CJK, bidi, and Indic people is more than 1/2
> > of the world population. Debian should not be designed only from the
> > viewpoint of European language speakers' convenience.
>
> Debian's mission is to support its users. I humbly suggest that while
> the summation of CJK, bidi, and Indic peoples may be more than 1/2 of
> the world's population, it's not even close to representing 1/2 of
> Debian's user population.
Well, you are right, but I think one of the reasons why Debian
(and other Linux/BSD systems) is not so popular in CJK world is
that it is not useful for CJK yet.
> Making Debian more accessible to CJK, bidi, and Indic users is indeed
> important just as it is important to make Debian more accessible to
> users with visual or motor impairments. However, I would caution
> against any of the user groups exercising some sort of veto power over
> policy enhancements to Debian which have no effect on them.
No effect? It is not true. I am Japanese speaker and a user of
Debian, so I know the effect very much.
In case of visual/motor impairments, I completely agree it is
important to support these users. If there are any easy
technical way to improve usability for them without spoil our
usability, it should be adopted. Unfortunately, I am not an
expert of this field and I don't have any idea. However, when
someone would propose something in this field, I would never
oppose them.
In future Debian, it would be nice if setting one configuration
(for example, INVISIBLE=yes), and all software will obey it.
I think it is not technically possible now. However, it is
technically possible to write LANG-variable-sensible softwares
and we should encourage such softwares, instead of "racist"
softwares which only supports European languages. Yes, people
should be called racist who refuse to support non-European
languages even though there are easy ways to do so and there
are no technical problem.
> In other words, the policy as proposed doesn't do anything to make life
> *worse* for CJK, bidi, and Indic users. It simply fails to make life
> better for them. However, this is mainly a job for upstream software
> developers. Debian developers are primarily system integrators.
We, as integrators, now have an easy way to improve equality between
languages, because there are several editors and other softwares which
can handle CJK/bidi/... languages. Why should we avoid giving priority
to such softwares?
> This battle was already fought with x-terminal-emulator. Why do we have
> to rehash it?
I didn't hear any convincing opinion against it. Anyway, I decided
to improve and internationalize terminal emulators. It takes years
and now it is partly successful. rxvt-beta and eterm have LC_CTYPE
sensibility support which is written by me. I am also joining the
development of mlterm and try to improve xterm with Juliusz's luit.
However, in this case, priority in Debian alternative system is
completely Debian's problem, not upstream problem.
> The proposed policy does not negatively impact the user community you
> claim to represent.
It is relative problem. Why *mandatory* item is less scored than,
for example, redo/undo feature which I agree is useful but not mandatory?
It is obvious my idea improves usability for non-European-language-
speakers. Also, it is completely Debian's (not upstream's) problem
and it is easy to achieve my idea. On the other hand, you didn't
explain a demerit of my idea which is large enough to compensate the
merit. Could you please explain? Or, do you have any alternative
proposal?
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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