Re: tlug: Problems with glib-1.2.new

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

>>>>> "David" == David Eduardo gomez Noguera <davidgn@example.com> writes:

    David> but why will glib be having problems with
    David> i18n?  because of unicode?

No.  Because nobody has really done anything about Japanese and other
Asian languages yet because everyone is waiting for glibc.  When there
is a stable glibc with full support for all the features, then people
will take I18N seriously.  Until then, there's not that much point
unless you want Ulrich Drepper to yank the rug out from under you
again as he has done several times in the past.  (Eg, most people want
16 bit widechars, but Uli has mandated 32 bit widechars for glibc.)

As of mid-1999, there was agreement between Uli and the Japanese
developers most active in glibc I18N development on organizational
principles, but Uli still controls the architecture and the agenda.
He will decide when to release, and when to declare the API frozen.

As far as I know, there are still some significant problems to be
solved, mostly having to do with regular expressions.  This probably
won't affect the rest of the glibc APIs, but last I heard Uli was
unwilling to promise that.  ... So there you are.

This is a big problem with open source software.[1]  The Linux Standards
Base, now merged with the Linux Internationalization Initiative, is an
attempt to ameliorate the problem.  Whether it will be successful,
nobody knows.


Footnotes: 
[1]  The problem is not the personalities; sure, Uli is an arrogant
guy, but he really is as smart as he thinks he is.  Overall, I think
I'd rather have him deciding glibc APIs than the Japanese developers,
who are commonly too close to the problems of Japanese to have a good
overview of I18N.

The problem is that there's no "boss" to say to Uli, OK, _now_ you
have to make a decision, because we want to get Gnome out the door for
Red Hat 7.0.

And that, too, is a _good_ thing by itself.  So this is an inherent
conflict in two important goals of open source software: user control,
and common standards.

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