On errno

[Alexander Leidinger]

Quoting Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> (from Thu, 02 Apr 2009  
06:51:56 +0000):

> In message <20090402084616.19846py8s75ogp44 at webmail.leidinger.net>,  
> Alexander Leidinger writes:
>
>> I agree with your general opinion about i18n and think that it is not
>> a matter of workforce, it's a matter of feasability. As soon as we
>> have the infrastructure, translations will show up "soonish". It's not
>> "if", it's "when".
>
> And once the novelty has worn off, we are left, as so many other
> operating systems, with at best 70% translation into each language.

If I adapt your reasoning to our docs, we need to delete all our  
translations and only keep the english one.

If you are pissed off by the missing 30%, submit a patch or stick with  
english. That's an adaption of what we tell to people when they  
complain about missing stuff in unmaintained areas of src/ports.  
Alternatively we can disconnect languages from the system if we think  
there's not enough coverage. Above you also average the interest over  
all languages, an generalization which doesn't hold, see below.

You assume we need to ship with 100% coverage in all languages. For a  
person which only uses 40% of one specific language, and this 40% are  
covered by 100%, it does not matter. If those 40% are a major part to  
allow to earn a person an income to feed childs and the relative  
other, great.

Note, people which set their LANG to something else already get only a  
xx% translated system, e.g. KDE/GNOME are displaying a lot of stuff in  
other languages, but stuff which is comming from FreeBSD itself is in  
english, so we have the situation you describe already and users are  
used to it (don't tell me this does not apply because we only program  
an OS, it applies, as for an user it does not matter what we program,  
_he_ is using a complete system consisting of an OS and other stuff,  
not only the OS without anything else). They do their best, they enjoy  
their native language where it is available and try to handle english  
when it is not available.

At some point I expect that we have some strong languages, and some  
not so strong languages. Which ones are which and how many languages  
we would have... I assume the trends regarding this for the handbook  
can give a hint.

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
In California they don't throw their garbage away -- they make
it into television shows.
		-- Woody Allen, "Annie Hall"

http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137