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Re: this all this xxx-jp nonsense (was: Re: ITP: grep-ja)



Let me come right off at the front and point out I fully agree with
Wichert.  Forking a binary package for each language is absurd.
(Documentation packages like the elisp manual are a little trickier.)

I mean, it's bad enough to be accused by some rather prominent people
in the free software world of having hidden forks in our packages, and
being accused of not participating with upstream developers.  But to
have our *own* packages forking into 2 or more packages because people
can't be bothered to contact even the "upstream" Debian maintainer is
just downright embarrassing!

Look, yes, it's a pain in the butt to work with other folks to
coordinate and get patches integrated.  Sometimes it takes longer than
it should.  But its the *right* thing to do.  We need to straighten
this out...

I hope the JP folks don't feel picked on -- they are just particularly
active.  I should say that in all my interactions with them they have
been very reasonable and dilligent.  I think it's just a question of
getting them acclimated.

> tcsh was soon adopt my proposal and now we can use tcsh-kanji
> with KANJI support and recently xfig also became of I18N.
> (To tell the truth, xfig was done mainly by Sano san :)

> Note that tcsh is separated to tcsh for non multi-byte users and
> tcsh-kanji for multi-byte users !!

This is ok, I guess, but then the package name (tcsh-kanji) is wrong.

> On the other hands, I reported xearth to merge patch and lynx to 
> compile with --enable-nls option but it seems no response yet.

You gotta be patient.

> How do you think about these situations ?
> 
> I do not do forking xxx-jp but try to do integrating as Akkerman
> recommended. And the integrating may be not so simple as non multi-byte
> users think.

Yes -- See Francois Pinard's tranlsation project
<URL:http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard/po/HTML/>-- there are many
problems and battles to get i18n and l10n upstream.  But it just has
to be done.  Maybe you could work directly with the upstream
maintainer, not just with the Debian folks.

Even within Debian we have a long way to go but we just have to do
it... there's no other way.  Forking isn't acceptable (to me at
least).

> I believe that JP does not want to do forking at all but strongly
> want to do integrating as Akkerman recommended.

I'm sure they do...  As I said, I've found JP and translators in
general very patient and kind.

--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>


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