Re: discovery: debian menu already supports l10n!
Hi Joost,
On Sat, Dec 04, 1999 at 12:04:12PM +0100, joost witteveen wrote:
> Then why did nobody mention that to me?
Okay - I have to take this blame. I was the one who complained about
the bad i18n support in menu. This was in the impression that nobody
is currently working on menu.
Also I feared to need a lot of time to push my ideas about localized
menus. Most of the time one has either
1) a maintainer who does not respond or
2) a maintainer who will argue that this feature is not needed.
So I decided to let it slip and come back when I have the time to
write the code myself sending it to the BTS.
> However, I don't know how to deal with that logistical problem:
> the much too low maintainer-to-maintainer communication is already
> causing many problems in debian, and this will make things wors.
Right! This is VERY lacking in Debian. Some maintainers respond within
a day, some need months and the rest does not respond at all. We need
to take care about this! But - what can we do?
I think whoever does not answer his mail in a reasonable time (minus
holidays) is not suited as a Debian maintainer and his packages should
be orphaned. This is a rather extreme view and I know we will not
have this. But I really HATE sending mail and having to keep track
of mail which I sent and expect an answer.
My english is quite bad so I want to explain this problem again:
Normally if I hit a problem at work I mail the person responsible
and forget about the problem. A few hours later I get a reply (or a week
later, it does not matter) and continue to work on whatever it was.
In Debian I write a mail and make a note I wanted to do something. Then
I wait for a reply. Then I send the mail again. If there is no reply
I write to -devel if I can take some action foo. I get no answer
because nobody feels responsible. In fact nobody is. So I still have
a package I want to maintain instead of NMUing and can't because nobody
gives me the right to do that.
> Do you agree that, with the two menu-mehtod functions I proposed
> above added, my approch creates gnome startup files identical
> to what you propose?
I would say yes. Thanks for your comments and work on this, Joost!
Great to know that some maintainers are still active...
> If I get a positive answer before december 5th, 0:00 GMT, I'll
> probably be able to add those functions (and the one I mention
> below) before december 6th.
Hmm, one hour before 0:00 GMT :)
> One other function I would like to add:
>
> forall($array,$var,$exec)
> For each value in the colon-seperated array $list (eg "en:es:eo"),
> set $var to that value, and print $exec.
> Example:
> forall($lanuages,$lang,"name[" $lang "]=" translate($lang,title()) "\n")
> #print "Name[es]=Clock del Sol" lines for each installed language
> Then a package that installs translations for a language only
> needs to add a value to the variable $languages, and all menu-methods
> will notice the new language.
Yep - this is what I had proposed if you did not mention it.
> I may also add some extra feature that will allow fvwm* etc generate
> menudefs.hook files for every language (menudefs-es.hook, etc).
> Then maybe someone could hack something in fvwm that it will first
> look for a menudefs-$locale.hook file, etc.
Sure - that should be very possible.
cu
Torsten
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