Re: The Distro Project: revisited

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

--- Muhammad Alkarouri <karouri at uofk dot edu> wrote:
> The main ideas of the distro project are now twofold:
> - To encourage the support of Arabic in Linux packages
> - To encourage the inclusion of such packages (supporting Arabic) in
>   distros.
> A start of such a page is currently (temporarily) at
>   http://www.uofk.edu/k/arabicsupport/
> and a notable point there is the short recommendation of
> 'distro certification'.
> A page will be set up for the packages like
>   http://www.uofk.edu/k/apps/
> This will contain the package specification. Pages for the
> redhat and mandrake distros will follow in arabeyes soon.

Muhammad, as has become customary - this all looks great and you are
most certainly headed in the right direction.  One thing I would highly
suggest (which I'm rather sure you are working on) is the inclusion of
the "urgency" of the packages (or their importance if you will) to
Table-1 on your 'apps' page.  You might want to somehow even color the
table and group silver/gold/platinum applications together.  Again,
the point here is to make it plenty clear to distros and users alike
what is missing/available at a glance.

Lastly the "Accepts arabic input" field feels kinda odd.  All Arabic
Linux applications will have to support UTF-8 (I would even tend to say
and no need to bother with the others :-), so I'm not sure if you are
denoting that or what.  If you are listing details about the packages,
I would suggest against that as its not necessary since this list needs
to be concerned only about which applications matter and not what their
feature set (and supported encodings) are (just my humble opinion).

BTW: on that table there is no need to include anyone's name in the
     status field; try to keep it objective :-)

Salam & Keep this great work and effort going !!

 - Nadim


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