Debian installer Status

[Anmar Oueja <anmar at canada dot com>]

Hello All:

It came to my attention that there is a lot of confusion as to what is 
hapening with Arabic support on the Debian installer. Well here it is:

1. Debian developers (Stever and Christian) are know working on 
perfecting the bidi,shaping code for slang (slang is the text based tool 
the render the text, draws the boxes...etc). You can see a pic here:

http://mail.arabbix.org/~anmar/tmp/arabic-screenshot.png

I am not sure as to when the next release of Debian installer will be 
out. But I am almost sure that it will have Arabic support.

Translation effort is back in action. We are trying to finish stage1 of 
the installer (stage 1 has the basic HD detection, network setup...etc). 
The other two stages (2 and 3) are nice to have but not necessary.

Once the Debian installer Arabic support is finished, my next job is to 
push the Debian group to adopt the new slang patch along with fribidi to 
 be added to the frozen base of Debian Sarge and Sid. This will allow 
us to localise projects like dselect, pppconfig, debconf...etc. In 
addition, I will be talking to the slang upstream maintainer to add the 
patch so newer versions will have Arabic built in :)

I encourage all developers to get the slang patch and pass it on to 
other distributions if they are not willing to wait for the next release 
of slang (assuming the patch gets accepted)

Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

Anmar