On Fri, 4 Sep 1998, Tomas Fasth wrote:

Hi, I'm the guy trying to translate Mailman to Swedish. Currently the task of doing a translation is managable but very time consuming. Further, since it involves editing code files it sure makes you feel insecure about it. It also complicates the task of having the code up to date with the main (american english) trunk although CVS can do a good job to make that task less painful. Anyway, in order to avoid chaos in localized installations, there seem to be a need to change the scheme of how to incorporate language specific text in user presentations. There has already been some postings about that. Unfortunately, using the "patch" approach will probably make the code look "messy" and less readable. Therefore it might be a good idea to do a re-design of the current text generation part of the code in Mailman. The question is, what is the proper procedure to achieve this? Is there currently an "architect" for Mailman? Is that person willing to coordinate such an efford? If a CVS branch is created for this purpose, how do you earn check-in permission for that branch?

Is there anybody out there who cares about this matter part from me (if not, why bother)?

These are good questions.

I would say that there is interest in general for localization, and in fact we had started to think about that independently of your efforts. But i should stress "started" - i'd say we're currently in an early stage of mailman's release to the world, and concentrating as much as we can on getting a stable release with the current feature set.

As it stands, the three of us who have been at the center (john, barry and i) are having less time than we hoped, for various and diverse reasons, to get to the first full release. And until we get there we will be trying to maintain a feature freeze, to avoid getting *further* away from our goal of a stable release.

This does not mean that your efforts for internationalization will be for nought, but we probably will be quite slow and reluctant to adopt most structural changes until we get over the hump of 1.0final. So i'd say the upshot is that you're going to need to be patient - we've just gotten together a lot of the infrastructure (with stuff like the mailing lists, the public CVS tree, and the web site) for collaborative development, but that sort of stuff is less than half the picture - the substantial stuff will be procedures and policies for coordinating a larger effort, and we're only starting to look at that.

Ken Manheimer klm@python.org 703 620-8990 x268 (orporation for National Research |nitiatives

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