A report from OSCON 2007 [LWN.net]

A report from OSCON 2007

Posted Aug 4, 2007 0:14 UTC (Sat) by jwb (guest, #15467)
In reply to: A report from OSCON 2007 by johnkarp
Parent article: A report from OSCON 2007

On Ubuntu, this is the rational given for using --no-archive:

"The rationale is that with an archive it is not possible to mix system and user defined locales by setting LOCPATH."

Presumably this complaint was raised by some user who wanted to so exactly that thing. On Ubuntu, this can be changed in /etc/belocs/locale-gen.conf

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A report from OSCON 2007

Posted Aug 5, 2007 16:51 UTC (Sun) by jbailey (subscriber, #16890) [Link]

Right. In Ubuntu we don't use the locales from the upstream glibc tree on the grounds that they're quite frequently wrong and (justifiably) hard to get updated. Since we already have communities of folks through Launchpad who are doing the translations for the software, we trust them to tell us the locale-specific needs that they have.

There are a few ways that we could fix this better and work on having multiple locale archives or some such, but we just haven't gotten there yet.

Ideally this could be resolved

Posted Aug 9, 2007 2:21 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

If the translations can be pushed upstream, everyone can benefit and you can use the cache.

A report from OSCON 2007

Posted Aug 9, 2007 8:34 UTC (Thu) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]

> In Ubuntu we don't use the locales from the upstream glibc tree on the grounds that they're quite frequently wrong and (justifiably) hard to get updated. Since we already have communities of folks through Launchpad who are doing the translations for the software, we trust them to tell us the locale-specific needs that they have.

This sounds a lot like you are saying you are trading "high quality and working with upstream" with "whatever we get from users without verifying".

Or maybe let me put it the other way:

If the upstream really is "frequently wrong", despite of being "(justifiably) hard to get updated", how come this "(justification)" does not apply to updates via launchpad? What magic makes launchpad updates so much more high quality that it's worth to fork locales?

> There are a few ways that we could fix this better

Please do. Ubuntu is getting a reputation of doing quick hacks to hide the problem instead of actually fixing the issue.

re: bitten by: http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/1/4/232