openstack team mailing list archive

[Sean Dague <sdague@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 04/11/2012 08:41 AM, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Sheng Bo Hou wrote:
> > After the research done by my colleage Edward Zhang and myself, we have
> > found the following issues for openstack. We have already raised bug
> > https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/974810
> > <https://bugs.launchpad.net/nova/+bug/974810>  .
> > [...]
>
> Thanks for your analysis. We plan to discuss how to fix and extend I18N
> at the summit. One question that was raised on the ML in February was
> whether internationalization was actually worth the effort for
> infrastructure software like OpenStack.
>
> I'll be the first to admit that there are other languages than English,
> but all our open development is based in English already (bugs, reviews,
> commit messages, mailing-lists, IRC...), so I don't think supporting
> more languages in the software itself will help growing our developer
> community.

I would tend to disagree with that. People are more likely to invest 
their time in software if they'll be able to use it better in their 
locale. I think this is definitely even more true in places where 
English has less of a dominant presence. It may even bring people to the 
table solely interested in helping with translation. I've seen that 
happen elsewhere.

> On our users community, do operators of OpenStack need translated error
> messages ? Given that translations are often incomplete, is it worth it
> ? What do comparable infrastructure open source software projects
> provide ? The effort to provide them has proven non-trivial, I'd like to
> make sure it's time well spent.

If we want to think about OpenStack as a basic building block like 
Apache, i18n is critical. Otherwise there are regions that won't adopt 
it solely because of a lack of i18n.

Is there a metric on the completeness so far? Something automated that 
could be a jenkins coverage kind of test?

	-Sean

--
Sean Dague
IBM Linux Technology Center
email: sldague@xxxxxxxxxx
alt-email: sdague@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx