Re: More support for European users in Debian
Orn E. Hansen wrote:
>
> I'm going into one of my brutally honest phases...
> [...]
> ... why don't we produce an all french machine... that speaks
> french and works in french... and then export it to the states.
> And then tell the Americans, "Hey, you all learn french in school",
> and then "Sorry, you'll just have to become a _computer_expert_ to
> understand the system messages"? Does it sound rediculous? why?
I'm not on the side of those who say that we all should speak english
and forget our "rediculous" local (and obsoleted) languages. No, no.
I'm exactly on the opposite side: I'm one of the guys who speaks louder
about the use of my language in computer science.
(just to let you understand I'm one of those mad boys who thinks that
dubbing in movies and tv are "a good thing" and that it should be
improved. Such a conviction is considered like a cultural crime here in
Finland :-)
I remember when I first studied COBOL (yes, I've done this also!) that
in the book all the statements were translated into italian. MOVE became
MUOVI, READ became LEGGI and WRITE SCRIVI ... a nightmare, as you can
imagine!
Habits in technical fields always tend to push the use of a certain
language, a slang to be more precise. Musicians are perfectly used to
have all the "keywords" in a score written in italian; botanists must
study latin because it is habit to use latin for the names ...
In computer science it is used the english language (or a subset of it).
There are an incredible amount of reasons why this happened, and is not
worth to question here (maybe in debian-talk :-)
This is the only reason why I say that a computer expert (like a sysadm
should be) must be able to read and write technical english (but is not
important if he speaks english :-)
There are also even more reasons why I say that we (computer experts)
should not push our habits behind users, but we should use their own
language because communication (not intimidation) is the goal of
messages.
> Or go to a toilet, where "Sorry, asians only" ?
Just to let humor take over this, I can remember you that our society
strongly discriminate between male and female, in toilets, and nobody
complains :-)
> Finally, MY environment here is set with LANG=is_IS at BOOTUP and to
> this date, I haven't seen one Daemon getting a nervous breakdown :-)
The problem is not in the system, nor in the daemons. It could be in the
existing software that analize that output, not only beacause of the
language (think of dots changed in comas; changes in the collate order
are unbeliaveble!). I had incredible problems when IBM decided that all
AIX 3 be installed with the locale setting by default ... even forcing
the change in /etc/environment didn't solved the problem because of cron
execution ... I had to order a new tape in Danmark and reinstall
everything.
If you consider that you can collect sysinfos in a network you can
imagine that having common formats is mandatory, even if some machines
are setted in different locales.
Anyway this is more a philosofical discussion, now.
My opinion is that we must insure a reliable, stable and well
predictable behaviour of the system to the sysadm, and an easy to
change, fully localized environment to the end user.
cheers,
Fabrizio
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> non scampa, tra chi veste da parata, chi veste una risata.[fg]|
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