Re: language-chooser: Language order shouldn't be alphabetical
On Sat, Oct 11, 2003 at 09:06:06AM +0200, Christian Perrier wrote:
>
> I would suggest adopting a policy for the language order. Of course,
> determining the "most important" languages is a very delicate thing as
> everyone would like to have his own language listed on the first page.
>
I tried to propose this a while back:
Message-ID: <20020305123633.GB23333@dat.etsit.upm.es>
Please re-read the thread:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-i18n/2002/debian-i18n-200203/msg00016.html
And I also highlighted this issue in my Debconf3 talk
(slides available at http://people.debian.org/~jfs/debconf/i18n)
> Finding a realistic criterion would be Good, maybe. Either the most used
> languages all over the world, or the languages for which Debian is most
> translated (french would become first, maybe..?:-))), or something based on
I'm not sure French would be the first one, there are a number of areas in
which other languages surpass French :-)
> developer number (german would then come first...)...or whatever else....
>
I suggest you come up with a sort of criteria and submit them for
discussion. Some come to mind, either global: criteria based on the
percentage of population that talks a given language (based on ethnologic
data), criteria based on the languages things (books, movies..) get
translated into (transalation demanded world wide), which the UNESCO
provides data about, or Debian specific: vitality of user/translators
mailing lists, translated/localised programs, translated/localised debconf
templates, traslated/localised documentation.
>From my point of view, languagechooser should base its ordering in a very
simple metric
a) Order languages based on how up-to-date and translated is the
the debian-installation,
b) In case of a tie, order language by usage as a mother tongue worl-wide
(first Chinese, then Spanish, then English, then Bengali, then Hindi....)
This should be based on some real-world data like
http://www.the-bag-lady.co.uk/wct/wf/index.asp?cont=worldlanguages or
http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp
So, in the event of the debian-installer being available fully-translated
in the following languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese
and Japanese, the order would be: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese,
German, French.
>
> This should probably be discussed in a very general mailing list as this
> impacts a very sensitive point....but expect no consensus reached.
And that mailing list is debian-i18n, not debian-devel. However, if no
consensus is going to be reached, what is the point of asking this to be
done?
Regards
Javi
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