Re: Deactivated languages
On Thu, Nov 16, 2006 at 10:37:52AM +0100, Jens Seidel wrote:
> I really, really cannot believe that it's OK to ignore useful und
> non-destructive work from people helping to partipiate in Debian.
> Maybe it't time to open a release critical bug report to this issue ...
Which would be a histrionic abuse of the BTS and would be closed
immediately.
> And the reasons for dropping languages?
> * Avoiding outdated/obsolete translations? No, not using PO format!
> * Saving memory? No, we could drop French for this or provide a new
> infrastructure which just ships compressed PO files and creates
> .mo files on the fly (maybe also dynamically loaded from the network
> or a CD). It would not save a lot but a few hundreds kilobytes ...
> * To force people learning other languages (English)? Probably ...
> * To support testing these languages? Ahm no, this requires the opposite.
> * It was requested by many developers or users? Haha!
It is perfectly reasonable to take the position that having an incomplete
translation of the installer for a language is *worse* than not shipping one
at all. You don't get multiple fallbacks in the installer like you can with
gettext; if the string isn't translated, you're stuck with English, and
English may *not* be the user's second choice -- they might have chosen a
different language had they only known that Debian had done such a poor job
of preparing the installer for their own language.
We are not releasing etch for it to be *tested*, we are releasing it for
*use*. There is no "early and often" that applies here, whatever we ship in
etch is bound to end up printed on CDs, shipped in magazines, and otherwise
sticking around in a more or less persistent form. There is no shame at all
in Christian's efforts to help ensure that whatever we ship as the installer
for etch is polished and usable.
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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