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 * Avoiding outdated/obsolete translations?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. [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.debian.org/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
