Re: RedHat 6.1 and Japanese

[Simon Cozens <simon@example.com>]

On Wed, Sep 06, 2000 at 07:54:21PM +0900, Austin Kurahone wrote:
> Bleah.  Chris, even I am a bit too cynical for that. 

&joke(type => "private", target => "chris", disposition => "really evil");

> I would bitch about how people should just get off their lazy butts and code
> if they want a good Japanized distro, but I know how much of a pain normal
> distro work can be, and it is something that I would only wish uppon some of
> my worst enemies.

I'm not sure what Chris' problem is. The entire *point* of distros is that
they collect other people's work. If you're going to have a Japanised distro,
you have to collect Japanised work (or at the very least, work sufficiently
I18Nised that Japanising it is trivial) - if I put out a piece of software,
the onus is on me to make sure it localises nicely if I want non-ASCII types
to use it. 

Similarly, it's not the responsibility of a bookshop to make sure the book I
want is translated into Greek; either the publisher gets it translated, or I
don't read it. The bookshop is neither here nor there. They just distribute
it.

Sure, in the case of distros, there *are* ways they can help, if they have the
time, money, expertise and inclination, and that's to feed localisations back
to the original project. Even so, the resulting product should still come from
the project maintainers, not the distribution.

But then, I guess, I'm in the camp that says distributions make very, very few
private changes to the software they get - I don't like the way Debian screws
up Perl, or the way RedHat screws up TeX, and I wouldn't like to find bug
reports from users on problems which only are occurring because some random
distro out there had fiddled with my software and not told me.

*sigh*. Where *did* I put that FreeBSD CD?

-- 
Putting a square peg into a round hole can be worthwhile if you don't mind a 
few shavings. -- Larry Wall