Re: Fedora and New projects

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

On Sun, 2004-05-09 at 18:41, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> I'm really unsure of Fedora's inclusion status ?  Will the translation work
> that has already taken shape (due to great efforts and sacrifice of a select
> few) be included ?  If not, why not ?

Well, I for one have not expected Arabic inclusion by FC2. To put it bluntly if
they have done that I would probably not be happy to use Fedora in future.The
distribution needs a fair amount of testing before it is included. When you
have got a package already you will update it fairly frequently to squash bugs,
but Arabic inclusion is an enhancement kind of thing, in other words an
addition. And if they include it now, when will they test it?

> While on the topic - why is it that we are working on projects that are
simply
> not using our work (Debian's installer (d-i) and now Fedora) ?  Why can't we
> get assurances about our works inclusion _BEFORE_ we start translating ?

In Fedora you _HAD_ the assurance. If you get it on time in the schedule, it
will be included. And we need to get it right, better than get it wrong. For
some time we based our logic on (Persian is on anaconda). It turns out that
Persian will not make it to the final release, and because of a minor
bug(IMHO).  Though they were nearer to including it.

> think Arabeyes has enough clout and history to say that if we give our word
> that a certain bit of work will get done, then that means it will

In fact I don't remember we said that Fedora _will_ be done in time for FC2. At
least not to Fedora people or others. We said we should catch that, for our
benefit.

> I realize there is history with all of this.  With regard to d-i it was
> to get Bidi included (which didn't happen) and so we thought we'd pressure
> them if we have 100% translations completed (bad idea and it didn't work)

Please tell us what happened. I assumed that d-i uses ncurses or newt,something
like that, and we weren't able to provide a BiDi enabled package, not that we
have something ready but they don't want to include that.

> and with Fedora I think we simply missed the boat entirely with regard to
> deadlines and thought we could pressure inclusion if the work was completed.

Exactly, which is not professional attitude enough for an institution like
Arabeyes.

Don't get me wrong, though. I know for a fact that we did splendid work.It
seems that may be within a year things will be different. For a distro to be
worthly on its name it will have to include Arabic. At that time, they will
come to us for assistance not the other way round;) And for Ossama, you are
doing a splendid work. We will catch FC3 (ISA). If it was for me, we would have
had a chance to catch FC10, and then only may be:)

> As we can see, the pressure'ing tactics based on completed work simply
> don't seem to work - we need to pressure them based on our user base
> (ie. number of users and possible market clout).

Suggesting another type of pressure. We maintain our own repository forfamous
distros. Say we have an apt repository from which Katoob and fonts (e.g.) are
apt-gettable for debian users. We will have sufficient testing for some time
and Arabic people will expect such programs from distros.
Then they will include it easily. 

For that we need developers like Debian developers (I know. Nadim's idea:). I
think at least we have a good example in our GNOME status now.

This is a TOL(TM) session. Random answer for random remarks

Salam,
Muhammad Alkarouri

PS. TOL is thinking out loud..


	
	
		
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