Re: [stellation-res] Stellation status

["Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2002-11-23 at 06:55, Rodolfo M.Raya wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> After a long absence I'm in contact again.
> 
> I've been reading all the messages since I left my house about 3
> months ago and this is the first opportunity I have to participate
> again.

Welcome back!

> I remember a couple of messages about international users of
> Stellation. I may change the map quite a lot these days as I'm
> currently working in Thailand and plan to use it here, in Singapore
> and Beijing as soon as there is a stable release that you can
> recommend. I18n is not a problem now, but in a near future Stellation
> will be used in Korea too and it will be a major issue.

Jonathan looked at doing i18n, and to do it full-bore all through the
code was incredibly complicated. So we decided, at the time, to put it
off until there was someone who really needed it.

My first question, before we get into any more detail, is how far
does the internationalization need to go? There's a bunch of
options:

(1) Be able to deal with international data. That is, make sure that
  all artifacts, comments, labels, names, etc., all work even in
  non-latin character sets. Since Java is working in UTF-8, as long as
  the databases can handle UTF-8 characters correctly, we're already
  there. But this requires testing to be sure in all the DBs - do you
  have any good UTF-8 non-latin data that you can give us for testing?

(2) Everything in (1) plus have all system messages be in translatable
  resources. Java and Eclipse both provide a lot of support for this,
  but it's still difficult. 

(3) Everything in (2) plus have all command names and options also be
  in translatable resources.

My opinion is that right now, (3) is probably not doable. Jonathan's
experiments with pulling all string literals out into translatable
resources showed what was involved. I think coping with it is just too
much complexity for us right now. 

(2) we could do if it was really necessary, but we'd need you to really
dig in and help.

> I'm worried because I will need to support Windows and Linux users
> alike. Is the Windows port already working?

We're working on it. Jonathan Gossage has done a lot of work on fixing
the windows problems, and those of us at IBM will also be looking at it
as we head for our alpha release, which we hope to do some time in 
december.


> I will make all necessary changes to use Firebird on Windows and
> Linux. But I don't know what needs to be done. Can anybody draft a
> list of adjustments?

For Linux, you should be able to just make sure that the
FirebirdDatabase class in org.eclipse.stellation.repos.database is
correct. Then just write some docs on how to set up Firebird so
that the database is ready for Stellation to connect and create
a repository.

> As I'm behind firewalls most of the time I don't have a current
> version from CVS. I hope to be able to get one soon and compile it
> without problems.

It would be best if you could get CVS access. We're working on setting
up regular builds, so if there's no way around the firewall, you but
your life will be easier if you can just do CVS updates from Eclipse. 

	-Mark

-- 
Mark Craig Chu-Carroll,  IBM T.J. Watson Research Center  
*** The Stellation project: Advanced SCM for Collaboration
***		http://www.eclipse.org/stellation
*** Work Email: mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx  ------- Personal Email: markcc@xxxxxxxxxxx