Re: Linux/Mozilla related Short-Term Contract

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Shimpei" == Shimpei Yamashita <shimpei@example.com> writes:

    Shimpei> But really, a lot of the blame in bad l10n by Japanese
    Shimpei> patchers can be laid at the feet of the original
    Shimpei> programmers who conveniently assumed byte=char.  It takes
    Shimpei> a lot of effort to fix that sort of an assumption.

True, but what was the alternative?  Wide chars were prohibitively
expensive for everyone for whom they weren't necessary 20 years ago.
Those "original programmers" spent as much sweat working around
platform limitations (including design idiocies) as Japanese
programmers do today dealing with the byte=char assumption.

And unlike the Y2K fiasco, non-Asians (in practice until a very few
years ago, non-Japanese) can't design or debug systems intended to
handle large character sets.  They don't know what the needs are.

    Shimpei> It also doesn't help that most non-Asian programmers
    Shimpei> assume that "everybody speaks English" and consider
    Shimpei> acceptable multibyte support Somebody Else's Problem.

Well, if "acceptable" means handling Shift-JIS, I think so too!  Not
my problem....  :-)

You should remember Drepper's talk well.  People still want glibc to
handle Shift JIS internally!  And the same stuff came up in Yokohama
last year in the Samba sessions.  This is all insane.

    Shimpei> Well, whatever. The end result is still sucky Japanese
    Shimpei> support on Linux that keeps rotting on the vine because
    Shimpei> the maintainer doesn't want to look at them.

Which is the nub of the matter.  Whether Japanese like it or not, to
have much influence on design decisions, they have to get to be core
developers.  That means getting patches accepted, which means writing
patches that don't stomp on the core team's goals.  Unfortunately,
that doesn't seem to be joshiki around L10N projects.

    Shimpei> which, maybe tonight I'll bother to figure out why the
    Shimpei> Japanized version of file(1) on Kondara thinks all JPEG
    Shimpei> files are "SJIS text files"....

omigawd.

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