[indiana-discuss] [i18n-discuss] OpenSolaris 2008.11 build_98 test results

[W. Wayne Liauh]

> > > Oops, forgot to mention this.  Most if not all
> of
> > the contact persons in
> > > the copyright page (for porting the Chewing IME
> to
> > Solaris) are no
> > > longer with Sun.  For sake of showing at least
> some
> > sincerity, perhaps
> > > this page should be updated.  :-(
> > 
> > Hmm ... it may need to be updated (I wouldn't know
> > ;-), but I wouldn't 
> > ascribe this delay to insincerity or any other
> > conscious dragging-of-feet - 
> > maybe it's just that the people who're still here
> are
> > rather busy ...
> > 
> > Michael
> > -- 
> > Michael Schuster
>     http://blogs.sun.com/recursion
> cursion, n.: see 'Recursion'
> 
> Yeah, when you, except under a very narrow set of
> conditions, cannot type the name of the President of
> China (in its native Chinese characters) into the
> "save file as" window in, and only in, the Solaris
> version of OpenOffice.org (it becomes garbled), and
> that Chinese characters show up, totally
> unexpectedly, in the menu bars of the English version
> of Thunderbird and Firefox, this is more than, IMO,
> just insincerity, but an on-your-face proclamation of
> "I don't give it a damn".
> 
> But, honestly, I believe this is Sun's internal
> politics that works at its worst.  Individual
> developers are not willing to cross the political
> lines.  In the first example, I am sensing that Sun's
> Solaris developers think this is an OpenOffice issue,
> and are unwilling to offend their colleagues in
> Hamburg; whereas Sun's Hamburg team plays deaf
> because it is Chinese characters--something they
> don't understand--that are garbled.
> 
> I mentioned this problem (by email) to one of Sun's
> OpenOffice community managers when he gave a talk in
> Beijing.  He was very careful not to touch this issue
> because he thinks, very sincerely, that it belongs to
> the OpenSolaris political domain.  At the end, it is
> the quality of the product that will suffer.  But if
> you are not part of the QA team, you'd better not
> make any wave.  :-)

Actually, going back to the "delay" issue, one of the SUN.com address owners that I knew left Sun more than two years ago, and his name (along with his SUN.com address) was still listed on the "contact persons" list.  This probably confirms my suspicion that some input method engines have not be updated for at least that long.

But I am more concerned as to whether this is merely a symptom of a much more serious problem, i.e., whether it involves insincerity ("sloppiness").

One of the strongest selling points that I am sure we all hope to attach to OpenSolaris is its multi-lingual feature, i.e., you can log into the English locale and your computer will behave with the full set of English GUI and all the customs associated therewith.  Since the world has become flat, you may have a need to use (or learn to use) a Chinese computer.  No problem, just log into the Chinese locale (or zh locale--zh stands for "zhongwen", the official Chinese spelling for "中文", ).  OpenSolaris is designed from the bottom up to be a global operating system.

All looks good, right?  At least in theory (or in a wiki list).  But in actuality, the Chinese locale is totally screwed up.  Shamefully screwed up.  I will use the following example to illustrate how bad the situation is (as if what I described heretofore were not bad enough).

When I switch from the zh locale to the en locale, I will be asked a question whether I want to change some of the directory names (for example Desktop "桌面" or Document "文件") from Chinese to English.

So I answered yes.  However instead of renaming the directory from "桌面" to "Desktop", etc., the current snapshot of OpenSolaris actually creates a new "non-directory" file called desktop, and keeping the  "桌面" unchanged.  Please see the screenshot:

http://tinyurl.com/5moq44

Since everything in the GNOME is associated with the Desktop or Document directory (which, as I described above, are created as non-directory files), the GNOME desktop is almost totally broken.

I don't think anyone cares about this issue.  But if Sun Beijing is willing to hire a student intern to work on these problems, I will be more than happy to pay for his/her stipend (but not Sun's overhead).  We have faced and solved identical problems in Linux, and I don't think it will take long in Solaris.
--
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