Forgive me for taking a while to get to the point... I feel the need to give some background. For the impatient, scroll down to the block labeled 'THE POINT'.
On the Gnome development list, there's been some discussion, lately, about allowing the non-English speaking world to communicate in their native tongues on the list. There's probably some English chauvinism in my attitude, but I don't like the idea of having people send messages in non-English languages to an English list... It seems to me that the project is global enough that if people start communicating in non-"standard" languages, without necessarily providing a mechanism for allowing people that don't speak the language to filter out those messages, the signal/noise can get pretty bad. At the same time, I agree with the need for people to be able to participate in a large community, without necessarily needing to speak English.
By having one-language mailing lists, a large percentage of the community might be excluded from the discussion. Right now, almost all discussions take place in English, and if a French list were to fork off, I suspect that, even though a good chunk of Aussies, Brits, Americans, &c. probably speak French, they would still just subscribe to the English list, and the French list would be nigh useless.
THE POINT:
I think it would be a good idea for mailing-list software to manage multiple language support. The mechanism I'm imagining involves setting up a bunch of '<listname>-<language>@<product>.org' submission addresses for the same list. The list server would then use a per-user preference setting to decide which members of the list want to receive mail in the message's language. The message is then sent out using that <listname>, and the Reply-To: header is set to <listname>-<language>@<product>.org. Maybe also have an X-Language: header, automatically inserted by the list server. By default, subscribe people to all languages.
Does this make sense? Or sound like a good idea? Please CC: me in all replies, as I'm not a subscriber.
--aidan
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Aidan Cully