Re: [stellation-res] Stellation status

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

On Mon, 2002-11-25 at 07:39, Jonathan Gossage wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Mark C. Chu-Carroll" <mcc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: "Stellation-res" <stellation-res@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Sunday, November 24, 2002 3:18 PM
> Subject: Re: [stellation-res] Stellation status
> 
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I believe that doing (2) and (3) properly requires a tool that is not
> currently available to my knowledge that would both automate the conversion
> process and also make the process of adding new internationalizable strings
> as easy as simply typing them. However, such a tool would need to be written
> as an Eclipse plugin which would make life somewhat difficult for the
> command line folks, or which would complicate release procedures.

My own opinion here is that if we can do something like this using an
Eclipse plugin, we should go ahead and do it, so long as it remains
*possible* for non-Eclipse users to work on it. If non-eclipse folks
have to do all of the internationalization work by hand, that's fine,
as long as the Eclipse method of handling it doesn't make it impossible
to do from the command-line. Even if making it easy to do from Eclipse
makes it slightly *harder* to do from the command line than it would be
otherwise. 

We *are* an Eclipse subproject, so we shouldn't be afraid to make use
of every bit of power that Eclipse can give us. 


> The Eclipse folks have written a tool that does part, but not all of the
> job. It works, but I was less than enchanted with the human factors and
> general usability. In any case it did not address the entire problem. If it
> looks as if there may be significant I8N demand during the early life of
> Stellation I could devote my time to this problem. We should remember that
> Asia is probably the fastest growing area on the planet with regard to new
> developers.

You're on the mark there. And one of our avowed goals is to simplify
distributed development, and interaction with overseas development teams
is one of the examples of distributed development where the problems are
at their worst, and thus, people are most willing to try something new
to solve them. So it is very much in our interest to make this system
work smoothly.

	-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