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Re: Exclusion, was: Clarification about krooger's platform



MJ Ray wrote:
> The debian-installer developers are working on probably the
> single biggest improvement to debian access for years, making
> it easier to install, but some languages that were in the old
> installer are not in the new one and the list has been closed
> for the next release with very little warning or announcement.

There were multiple announcemnts and as much time as possible before
closing the set of supported languages for sarge d-i. We have complete
translations into 38 languages (vs 22 for boot-floppies) and so far the
only additional languages we've gotten translators for and had to defer
until after sarge are Malagasy, Vietnamese, Serbian, Hindi, Northern
Sami, Irish, Macedonian, Tagalog, Estonian, Belarusian, and Punjabi
(Gumurkhi). The only language that has been dropped that was available in
the boot floppies is Esperanto. I suspect that is not a significant
exclusion; wikipedia puts the number of native speakers of Esperanto as
a first language at "200 to 2000".

> I think all the lost languages are simply because there were no d-i
> developers who use that language in touch with their user group,
> rather than any wrong-doing on d-i developers' part. After all,
> it's time-consuming to communicate in someone else's language
> and they're busy already.

It's actually rather stunning the amount of work that Christian Perrier
and other language coordinaters have done to find translators and work
with them.

> So, there's far more obvious exclusion produced by lack of language
> support than by using a "wrong" example gender in English.

Doubful. IIRC, Christian estimates that roughly 65% of the world's
population is able to use d-i in a language they know.

-- 
see shy jo

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