> I wonder if Esperanto speaking people do use there software that way? I know > that Debian offers Esperanto. Do you know about how many users this are?
I've become used to seeing Esperanto messages from some of the programs I use. > Is there any > country where it is primary language? No. > From a technological point of view: In most cases (except the Esperanto > Debian users) the system language isn't Esperanto? So Esperanto isn't > selected by default when installing a software. You have to explicit choose > that in the settings of a specific software. Right? I'm not sure about that. Certainly you can set LANGUAGE=eo:la:sa in your shell and then get messages in Esperanto/Latin/Sanskrit from any program you invoke from the shell, if the program has any of those languages. In Debian /etc/default/locale sets LANGUAGE. Do other Linux distributions do something similar? > Of course from the cultural and political perspective it make sense as a > "statement". It could be compared to translate software into minority (e.g. > Native American languages) or "forgotten" languages. But my project don't > have the resources for "statements". I think it's probably best to treat Esperanto the same as any other language and try to apply the same reasonably objective criteria. I think you might as well accept a translation into any language as a contribution to the upstream source. Even an incomplete translation might inspire someone else to contribute to it, so it might eventually become complete, and a translation in one language might occasionally help someone doing the translation into another language. Which languages to include in a default build is another question. You could include every language, and that might be a reasonable thing to do with some software, but there is the disadvantage that some users will then see a mixture of languages, which could be confusing. So one thing you could perhaps do as an upstream maintainer is have a manually maintained po/LINGUAS file (or equivalent) that lists only the languages that meet your criteria for well-maintained-ness. A month before you do a release you could e-mail translators whose languages are at risk of being removed from the that list. Package maintainers and people who build from source could then choose to include a bigger or a smaller set of languages, but most will probably just follow the upstream default, so the "problem" of a user with LANGUAGE=eo:de:en seeing 20% of the messages in Esperanto, 78% in German, and 2% in English, for example, would be avoided. Edmund --
