Re: discovery: debian menu already supports l10n!
"Sean 'Shaleh' Perry" <shaleh@valinux.com> writes:
> not to poke, but it is I 18 N.
No, no, *L* 10 N. You need a better screen font or something, if you
can't tell a lower-case 'l' from an upper-case 'I'! :-)
The menu system already has i18n support. What it lacks is good l10n.
IOW, you can change the language, but it's a global change. You can
build ... well, you can build esperanto menus, and if we had more
translations available, you could build spanish or japanese menus, but
you can't build multi-lingual menus. If you build japanese menus,
then the korean guy is stuck, and if you build korean menus, then the
japanese guy is stuck.
Multi-lingual menus are what you need for l10n. And Gnome and KDE and
possibly Windowmaker all support multi-lingual menus. Which is why I
think that Debian's menu system should too. Maybe even must.
> Debian must support i18n. We should also strive to help out our
> Asian friends who need multibyte support.
Yes. I don't think that multibyte is a big deal when it comes to
menus -- the Gnome menus seem to have multibyte characters in them,
and it doesn't seem to cause any problems. But we should probably
check.
> This seems like a major kludge.
Perhaps, but the fact that this already works without any modification
to the existing menu system seems like a Big Win. I can think of some
enhancements to the menu system that would help, but we don't actually
need them.
In my experience, most i18n/l10n code looks like a major kludge until
you consider the alternatives. :-)
cheers
--
Chris Waters xtifr@dsp.net | I have a truly elegant proof of the
or xtifr@debian.org | above, but it is too long to fit into
http://www.dsp.net/xtifr | this .signature file.
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