Summary of the 2008-03-11 Packaging Committee meeting

[Jeff Spaleta]

2008/3/13 Nicolas Mailhot <nicolas.mailhot at laposte.net>:
>  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.
>
>  I'm quite surprised people have such an English-centric view of an
>  international project like Fedora.

Languages are a tough nut to crack when it comes to collaboration.
It's really difficult to get stuff done if a core group of people
aren't able to communicate with each other using a common language.
For most if not all of the technologies in this project, the tendancy
happens to be English.  This is reinforced by a lot of the historic
choices made in to use ascii in the programming languages we are learn
how to 'speak'.  I'm sure there's an alternate universe out there
where computer languages were originally based on Sanskrit. I might
have even seen it on an episode of the Sliders tv show.

So as we try to expand the global project we are bound to find tension
between the tendency for productive groups of people to need a common
language, and the desire to see bring in a diverse group of people in
the project in a substantial way.  I'm not sure what the best answer
here is.  I will say that if the project was not English centric, I'd
probably be unable to participate to much of any extent, so I'm
sensitive to how non-English speakers feel about the situation.  I'm
hoping that having Max over in Europe helping to organize the much
more language diverse community there, will bring some new ideas to
the table.

-jef