Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Michael Schwendt]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:55:08 +0100 (CET), Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> >> For the record: I care nothing for the rpm file name.
> >
> > The rpm file name is at the frontier. It is displayed to the user by
> > the installer, by package tools, and it may need to be input at the
> > command-line or in graphical apps.
> 
> Nope. You intentionally keep confusing the [...]

I disagree, and I see we don't discuss the same things.
Perhaps you're on a mission.

I don't care about what names people give their software, whether
they design shiny logos with glyphs that are unknown to me.

I don't care if they don't publish any web pages and documentation
in a language I don't understand. If they don't want to be multi-lingual,
that's not my problem.

I don't care whether there is a software package in the Fedora repository
that uses only languages I don't understand, provided that it is not
in a default install or otherwise tied into the system.

What I do care about is that the Linux distribution is not subverted
with languages and glyphs I don't understand or can't display. I also
very much care about the project language that is used on the primary
mailing-lists, for example.

> > What would happen during package review with an application that is
> > completely in German without any English message object files?
> 
> It would be accepted. Period. As long as [...]

Why did you continue after the "Period"?
Is it so difficult to answer a question without adding presumptions?
There is no reason to fight attempts at trying to understand the
problems and the goal.

> If you can't understand an app you don't have to install it.

Only if this is my decision actually. You say "an app", but realistically
it could also be a library with a -devel package that finds its way into a
dependency-chain (or even the buildroot) and contront users/packagers
with no choice.

> What do you think langpacks and dictionnaries are?
> They're locale-specific Fedora
> components that can be totally uncomprehensible and useless to
> English-only speakers.

Haven't you payed attention to my question about i17n/m17n/l10n?

> >> > I have the feeling that at first the door
> >> > for package names with multi-byte characters is opened, and as a
> >> next
> >> > step, file names in packages will use multi-byte characters, too.
> >>
> >> This ship has sailed long ago and our official policy already
> >> explicitely allows this. In fact it goes further: filenames MUST be
> >> UTF-8, so a latin-1 filename that goes beyond the core latin subset
> >> common to UTF-8 and latin-1 is forbidden.
> >
> > Any ship can be sunk.
> 
> The factual argument being?

It's the reply to your "The ship has sailed long ago", and the
argument is in the following sentence:
 
> > A policy can be revisited/refined, because non-ASCII glyphs in file
> > names
> > are a problem in a default setup that doesn't display them correctly
> > and
> > that requires extra efforts to enter them.
> 
> These are bugs to be fixed.

So, the system is not ready yet, which is a blocker criterion as I pointed
out before.
 
> >> We already ship lots of code commented in other languages than
> >> English
> >> (for example, OO.o IIRC) so this ship also sailed a long time ago.
> >
> > That's still only due to its Star Office history, isn't it?
> 
> No.
> 
> That's due to the fact Fedora is a *distribution*, built from [...]

When Star Division developed the closed-source Star Office, Fedora
did not even exist.
 
> With your logic OpenOffice.org would have no place in Fedora.

??? Now your confusion is complete. Please don't put words into my mouth.
You don't know my "logic" yet.

> Stomping on other people
> naming choices is utter disrespect. That's not how you build an
> healthy FLOSS community.

Ah, come on, this has nothing to do with disrespect. We already strip
upstream tarballs and exclude certain stuff from it, because only parts of
a product are compatible with our project policies. We disable features,
we patch some things completely. Transliterating project names into
characters from a limited package name alphabet is a matter of usability
and technical concerns. The primary spins default to American English,
with the translations only being secondary and as the translation project
resources permit.