A lot of everything…

  • Noticed a thread about “Rethinking Supported Language” on the gnome-i18n mailing list. There are relevant links in the mail itself which point to a larger round of discussions happening. I think that there are two things to consider here:
  • “Supported Language” status is a tag that gets a language a mention in the Release Notes. A lot of communities put in a bit of sprint to ensure that the language ends up being “supported”. It is as much a badge of pride as it is a result of team work, communication and the very best of localization. The distributions which pull in GNOME as their primary, secondary or even tertiary desktop don’t really care much about whether the language is “supported” or not and build, qa and release it all the same.
  • Having said that, it might (note the “might” here) be a good idea to re-look into whether “Supported Language” should be more emphatic at GNOME as a desktop and not GNOME as a platform. The good side of this could be that languages with smaller teams can work a bit more actively towards being a “Supported Desktop Language” rather than a “Supported Language” on the platform. The implied downside is that once some language is a “Supported Desktop Language” the l10n support for the platform specific bits may not be happening. I tend to argue that any l10n team which wants to provide a complete and richer experience for GNOME in their language will eventually end up attempting platform and documentation as well.

In effect, perhaps a round of discussion on what is essential for the “Desktop” and what could be tagged as “Platform” may turn out to be a good way of doing things.

  • The report is out and is available. It has some lovely words and I particularly liked “I hereby thank all the people that hacked, translated, documented, decorated, and marketed all of this, making it a reality. You have given us freedom, good jobs, and a priceless group of friends.” The somewhat never talked about gain of participating in a FOSS project is the group of friends that one finds around oneself. They are what make the process of contribution fun.
  • Having had a taste of Avial (the Malayalam alternative rock group) at freed.in I obtained their album from MusicYogi.com. The album is much better than what I expected. A nice word here for MusicYogi folks as well – they send the CDs over well packaged and within time. I expect to get this as well. Yay !!
  • Dropped a pretty package on The Collector’s Edition and thus expect to be making time to watch it sometime.
  • Some friends have started off a project called Touchstone which hold promise of greater things to come.
  • Favorite picture of the week: Sayamindu in profile and the obligatory picture of the new toy: Bengali (India) on Asus EeePC