The Linux I18N And Standard Base Merge

Leo Comitale writes "According to this press release the Linux Standard Base and the Linux Internationalization (I18N) project have merged and are calling themselves the Free Standards Group. I think it is really important for Linux to have a basic, low level standard for file system layout and support for international languages. These areas are critical to keeping Linux from splintering into a bunch of incompatible variants, and it seems these efforts are not getting as much support as they probably should be."

Comments

Re:Sprechen Sie Espanol, Monsieur?

[dsplat]

Flame on, Pike. Some of us are actually doing something about it. I hardly think that people should use a different OS or a different compiler simply because they have different native languages. That doesn't make any sense. However, with free software, it doesn't make any sense to whine about not having translations into your own language. If you want them, do them yourself. I'm doing exactly that.

However, there are a few pieces of underlying support necessary:

1. The underlying software must actually read translated messages from somewhere (the GNU gettext mechanism works pretty well).
2. Character sets and fonts that support your alphabet must be supported.
3. The messages to be translated must be made available, and preferrably, the translations should be rolled back into the main distribution of the program.

As for native speakers of American English (of which I am one), even if you are monolingual, there is a decent chance that you would like to have customers in other countries with names constructed out of funny characters. Having the software you run handle their names correctly doesn't hurt. Frankly, I'm not at a disadvantage if all the menus, error messages and help files are in English. But I need to be able to enter data that contains foreign characters. Internationalization benefits more people than you realize.