[Mailman-Developers] Internationalization

[Barry A. Warsaw]

I was away at the Python conference all last week, so it's nice to see 
there are only about 113 Mailman messages to catch up on :-).  I will
say that I thought Ken's talk went well, and we certainly had a lot of 
interest from Pythoneers about Mailman.  We had a lot of interesting
off-line discussions about where Mailman is and where it could go.

The following are my thoughts on what we need to do in the short
term.  I would like to have a stable 1.0 release by the time of the
Usenix LISA 98 conference, where we have another paper and where John
will (hopefully) be giving a talk.  This isn't very far away so I feel 
we need to be *really* conservative in what we try to do before then.

I agree with John that internationalizing Mailman should be a top
priority, but I don't really think we can make much headway in the
next 3 weeks or so.  In my experience CVS branches suck so I try to
avoid them, but if other core developers have more confidence in them, 
I'll go along for the ride.

I think we should shoot for NO new features, but just banging the hell 
out of the current source tree, expecting to have all the current bugs 
shaken out in time for LISA.  Once 1.0 is released, then we can talk
about an architecture for supporting all the contributed
translations.  It's great to see there's a lot of enthusiasm for
supporting languages other than English.

-Barry