Re: Distros project

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

Salam, Nadim and Munzir
Salam, everyone

 --- Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com> wrote: > --- 

> Yeah, I'm looking forward to the SAIS doc (formerly
> LAS) this coming
> sunday from Mr. Alkarouri.
> 


Will come in time, in shaa Allah.


> > Long answer:
> > The MAPS doc is _not_ meant to be a howto
> actually. This doc is born to die. 
> > It's sad for me to say this but it's the truth.
> MAPS, RAPS and xAPS 


Munzir, no need to be sad. I am working in this
project exactly to get rid of it :). A doctor should
try to reduce the number of diseases to zero, he
should not complain of less diseases. In the long
future, I look to SAIS as a standard that is so much
in usee no one remembers it actually.


> I think there are two issues here that seem to have
> been jumbled together.
> 
>  1. The "distros" project was intended to serve the
> distro maintainers
>     and manufacturers - so we can tell them "hey,
> you need this and that
>     and fix this and that to get proper Arabic
> support - you also need
>     these applications, etc".  We intended to start
> with SAIS to be a
>     template that would tell any and all distros
> what we require.  So
>     Arabbix would (and should) look at SAIS and know
> exactly what to


Yes, and SAIS will benefit from the experience by
Arabbix and other in its deelopment.


>  2. The "distros" project has also morphed (which is
> good) to include
>     info on various details with regard to what
> needs to be done from
>     a user prospective to get a distro to limp into
> Arabic support.
> 


The two jobs go hand in hand, you discover the where
the problem is, you tell the user a workaround, you
tell the developer a bug. As for dividing it in two
documents, this is a good idea, though an alternative
exists:
- Maintaining a SAIS document that gives specification
to all distros.
- Having a correspondence channel with them. I see
Munzir is already doing this with Mandrake, and we
have it already for Arabbix.
- Any requests to a distro can be filed as a bug
report to them, mentioning the SAIS document. A bug
document should exist in Arabeyes showing the current
Arabic-related bugs, a suggestion already made.


> I doubt they'd be
> interested in a 20-page document; from their
> prospective they'll want to
> see a list
> or a table of what we require for proper Arabic
> support and what we deem
> broken in their respective distros (not even the
> fixes just yet) and some
> reference (contact info, further details, etc).


No one is interested in a large doc, I agree. May be
the list/table is similar to the bugs page, so we
unify these.


> The SAIS document is the key here which will be
> generic and agnostic of
> any distro - it will include everything we require. 
> Spin-offs from SAIS
> will cater to the distros and not end-users. 
> Further details on what to
> fix (akin to MAPS) are then further separated.  I
> don't think I've said
> anything new here, except to point out that MAPS
> will not be what distros
> will want to see.  Again, we need to show them a
> table of applications
> we want included (with a priority list) and a list
> of bugs/problems within
> their distro -- a single page would do.


I got you now, actually. Though it's not very
different from what we are doing. Remember that all
docs are currently evolving.
May be if we have a hierarchy of:
SAIS
  |------|--------------|
MAPS    Arabbix APS    Fedora APS
  |
Mandrake Howto ...

with howtos easily accessible from outside.

A thing that is not easily pointed out in this
hierarchy is how we request software to install to get
Arabic (e.g. Katoob). Is it from both MAPS (please
include software) and the howto(install this software
till they include it)?


Disclaimer: This thread of discussion has nothing to
do with the fixed release date of the next SAIS
document. Don't expect any of the ideas here to be
included in the immediate next version. Some may,
though.


Salam,
karouri

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