Christian, thankyou very much for your reply. On 07/08/2006, at 10:04 PM, Christian Perrier wrote:
Exactly. My colleague has offered to build the packages for us. Should he go ahead and do that? Is there any specific procedure he should follow?Well, the usual procedure when one wants to build new packages:http://www.debian.org/doc/developers-reference/ch-pkgs.en.html#s- newpackageIf he/she feels OK for developing and maintaining the package him/ herself:-post an ITP (Intent To Package) bug report -read the documentation on www.debian.org/devel to learn about Debian packages building. The Developer's Reference and the Debian Policy are the must read ones. -create a first tentative package and find some official Debian developer, or any other Debian package maintainer, to look at it and help him/her making it compliant with the Debian policy -find a "sponsor", ie someone willing to upload the package. That means an official Debian developer -be prepared to MAINTAIN the package, ie deal with bug reports that will come. In short, this is not a one-shot work
OK, I'll discuss this with him. His English is fairly good, so he may be able to handle that; if not, I can help. Or...
An alternative procedure is posting a "RFP" bug report ("Request for
Packaging", see http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/n and mor eprecisely
http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/requested). Here, the chances that a
DD pops up and works on the package are pretty low.....most work on
what is their center of interest, this is how it works in a
volunteer-driven community.
we could do this if we get stuck. :(
But I would imagine it would affect the installation, if at any point the user has to input text. Hopefully display will be OK. The screenshots in Dejavu from a non-Vietnamese user were ugly but did show the characters mostly displaying. Dejavu has improved a bit since then.It may affect the installation at places where Vietnamese texts could be needed. From experience, the only place where this can really happen is the first created user real name. Actually, I must say that, part from Latin-based languages, I'm pretty sure that no complex input method is likely to work (for Indic, Thai, CJK, Khmer and probably Vietnamese)... Improving this and having all complex input methods working during the early installation phase is a post-etch issue.....which I'm not sure we have an easy way to solve.
Well, let's hope we don't need it during installation. We don't create usernames that require Vietnamese-specific characters: we've never found a system that could handle them. ;)
(And even if your system supports Unicode well, your filenames etc. won't only exist on that system. Pan-machine Unicode support has a long way to go yet.)
BTW, my colleague has also reminded me about a package of Vietnamese fonts which is GPL ! [1] It's called URWVN. How do we go about including these fonts in the Vietnamese task? The fonts are available in .tar.gz form, so would also need to be packaged. Shall I ask my colleague to package them too (before he realizes how much work I'm giving him and disappears :D ) ?Well, here, you may get some help from the Fonts Packaging Team (pkg-fonts-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org). Some of us already maintain font packages for severa languages and maintaining one more woul dnot be a big extra hassle.....or we could make the package officially maintained by the team as a whole. Just mail this list and point them (us...) to the place where these fonts are available. Pointing to their license (ie checking that they are really GPL) will help a lot.
OK, will do.
Again, it's a great pity I can't get a Debian-user co-translator. I can't anticipate these problems, because my OS doesn't have them. :(Well, sure. You need to convince the Vietnamese Linux community that going more closely with Debian is The Way To Go. After all, they're all committed to Free Software, so explaining them that working with the Linux distribution that's the closest to the Free Software movement philosophy is more or less the only choice if really committed to free software...:-)
I'm told it's a leadership issue. I've been gradually nudged into this rôle, although it's not one I've ever had an ambition to fill. I just want to sit in my little corner and translate files. <sigh> But with luck I can get some people started, once our language is supported.
from Clytie (vi-VN, Vietnamese free-software translation team / nhóm Việt hóa phần mềm tự do)
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/vi-VN
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