[eclipse-dev] Comment on Eclipse Project 2.0 Draft Plan: Internationaliz

[manahan@xxxxxxxxxx]

Hi, Am not sure about the best way to comment about this but picking a
short piece at a time seems easiest to discuss.

Anyway the following is the part  being commented on.

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Internationalization


 The Eclipse Platform is designed as the basis for internationalized
 products. The user interface elements provided by the Eclipse components,
 including dialogs and error messages, are externalized. The English
 strings are provided as the default resource bundles.


 We will perform basic tests in German and Japanese locales.


 IMPORTANT: Internationalization is supported only on Windows platforms in
 the 2.0 release.
 BIDI support


 Eclipse is a platform for building development environments targeted at
 technical professionals. Eclipse 2.0 will permit technical professionals
 who are working in English to build Hebrew/Arabic end-user applications.


 IMPORTANT: BIDI is supported only on Windows platforms in the 2.0 release.
-----------------------
The document speaks of "Internationalization" this can actually be broken
down into 2 parts enablement and translation. Enablement being that the
core function works with any language(ie work in 1 language and target
another). Translation being the strings are externalized and translated
into different languages. So since Translation is being for  Windows that
means it is ready for all platforms so the issue is with enablement on
other platforms.

Basically then except for windows all other OS versions of eclipse must run
and develop for  a default english locale (i assume "en_US")  to be
supported. This is a fairly severe restriction. It means eclipse cannot be
used to create/work with internationalized code except for on Windows.

What is the primary reason for no NL enablement of eclipse on anything but
Windows?
    - Is it test effort
    - Lack of OS support
    - No time to acquire the necessary skills for cross-platform enablement
    - too hard to retrofit easily as it wasn't thought of at design time
(having done several retrofits before I know for a fact its way easier if
you design enablement in rather than retrofit it).
    - Lack of time in general?

Reason I ask is we were expecting to ship an NL version of WSAD for Linux
based on the 2.0 version eventually. At that time we were expecting eclipse
to be NL enabled.

 Without it we have to evaluate how to handle the problem. And some of the
reasons can hopefully be resolved with help.

Thanks,
_____________________________________
Peter Manahan
WSAD Linux Port Team
VisualAge for Java Release Lead
manahan@xxxxxxxxxx
_____________________________________