Re: Listing for Debian in multi languages at www.li.org
Hi,
At Thu, 15 Nov 2001 09:21:53 -0400,
Ben Armstrong wrote:
> However, there really isn't any indication of the degree of support for
> the languages listed here. To what extent must there be support for a
> language before we tell the world "Debian is available in language foo"?
This is a difficult question. For example, Linux console cannot display
East Asian languages. Does the fact mean that Debian doesn't support
these languages? On the other hand, can a fact that there is only
one software which can handle language foo mean that Debian support
the language foo?
I mean, the expected level of "support" is different from languages
to languages.
However, there are some signs from which we can say Debian support
the language foo.
- Existence of debian-<language> mailing list should surely mean there
are many users in the language.
- "language-env" package supports several languages, which means
the speakers of the languages can use Debian.
- Existence of "manpages-<language>" package or other
"<document>-<language>" package probably means that <language>-
speaking people can use Debian in their mother tongue. At least,
it surely means that Debian has some methods to display the languages.
- There are many packages which contain a name of a language within
the names of the packages. It should mean the package supports the
language. However, it also means that if you want to use the language
you will have to use this special software. "arabtex", "grep-ja",
"hanterm", "xiterm+thai", "rxvt-ml", and so on.
In spite of such ambiguity, I am sure the list (English, Chinese,
French, German, Italian, Spanish) is too poor. "language-env"
package supports the following languages:
1 : be (Bielaruskaja,Belarusian)
2 : bg (Bulgarian)
3 : de (Deutsch,German)
4 : es (Espanol,Spanish)
5 : fr (Francais,French)
6 : ja (Nihongo,Japanese)
7 : ko (Hangul,Korean)
8 : mk (Makedonski,Macedonian)
9 : pl (Polski,Polish)
10 : ru (Russkii,Russian)
11 : sr (Srpski,Serbian)
12 : th (Thai)
13 : uk (Ukrajins'ka,Ukrainian)
Of course these languages are only a part of available language in
Debian, because language-env package is not perfect.
---
Tomohiro KUBOTA <kubota@debian.org>
http://www.debian.or.jp/~kubota/
"Introduction to I18N" http://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/intro-i18n/
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