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---nirik has changed the topic to: Fedora IRC Classroom - Fedora i18n with your teacher Jens Petersen ( juhp ) - See Classroom for tonights class schedule. Feb 07 05:29
nirik juhp: you ready? Feb 07 05:29
juhp I am here now Feb 07 05:30
nirik excellent. Take it away. ;) Feb 07 05:30
juhp okays Feb 07 05:30
juhp hi everyone Feb 07 05:30
juhp this is the Fedora i18n class Feb 07 05:30
juhp I am called Jens Petersen Feb 07 05:31
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*juhp has been having a busy day so hasn't been following the other classes alas Feb 07 05:31
juhp who's sitting in on this one? :) Feb 07 05:32
juhp I want to make this pretty informal so feel free to interrupt any time and ask questions Feb 07 05:32
fenris02 there's a good number of folks present, i'm guessing they're ready Feb 07 05:32
juhp and I'll try to answer and take any extended discussion to the end Feb 07 05:33
juhp yep cool Feb 07 05:33
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juhp so this talk is about software Internationalization and particularly in the context of Fedora Feb 07 05:33
*juhp wishes at times like this he was a faster typist :) Feb 07 05:34
juhp so today I am thinking to cover/touch on Feb 07 05:34
juhp (after an intro) Feb 07 05:34
juhp a bit on languages and locale Feb 07 05:34
juhp little on fonts and fedora fonts Feb 07 05:35
juhp about "input" (as in input of text) Feb 07 05:35
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juhp localization of software Feb 07 05:35
juhp and depending on time etc round off with how one can contribute and get involved with fedora-i18n Feb 07 05:36
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juhp anyway it is a pretty flexible class so I am happy to take it in various directions depending on what people want :) Feb 07 05:36
juhp so Feb 07 05:36
juhp What is i18n? Feb 07 05:37
Falstius how do people usually say i18n? Feb 07 05:37
juhp i18n of software means making it work well for everyone Feb 07 05:37
juhp on the planet Feb 07 05:37
juhp Falstius: good question Feb 07 05:37
juhp usually it is pronounced (using English wording) "eye- ay - teen" Feb 07 05:38
juhp I am not good at phonetic alphabet Feb 07 05:39
juhp something like that anyway Feb 07 05:39
Falstius ok Feb 07 05:39
juhp standing for Internationalization and the 18 characters between the leading "I" and the final "n" :) Feb 07 05:39
Falstius thanks :) Feb 07 05:40
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*fenris02 smirks Feb 07 05:40
juhp there are a few sister abbreviations: l10n (localization), m17n (multilingualization) and g10n (globalization) Feb 07 05:41
cuga learn something new everyday :) Feb 07 05:41
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cuga always thought it stood for something more... 'technical' haha Feb 07 05:41
brunowolff And here I thought it was some sort of sound alike shorthand. Feb 07 05:41
juhp so i18n of software means that the software supports display of text (eg UI/GUI) in native languages and allows input of native text and printing of output, etc Feb 07 05:42
juhp :) Feb 07 05:42
juhp so that's briefly on the concept of software i18n Feb 07 05:43
juhp so from the of view of programming it covers both input systems, rendering of text, and also localization technology (allowing application to be translated or "localized") Feb 07 05:44
juhp So now the question is Feb 07 05:44
juhp what does i18n mean or cover in the context of Fedora Feb 07 05:44
juhp as you see it is in fact rather wide covering area so in some sense of form it affects and relates to many, many components and packages in Fedora and also its infrastructure even Feb 07 05:46
juhp of -> or Feb 07 05:46
juhp Fedora i18n project in the Fedora Project is concerned with the i18n of fedora - particularly the desktop(s) but of course also a lot of other aspects of the OS, etc Feb 07 05:47
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juhp of course these days thankfully the open source and free software community and efforts are becoming more and more international and it almost goes without saying that any large project with user facing coding will be internationalized (i18n'ed) upstream Feb 07 05:49
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juhp so all big projects, like GNOME, Mozilla, KDE, Openoffice.org (just to name some obvious ones) all have their upstream i18n work and l10n teams Feb 07 05:50
juhp so that everyone can benefit from it - it just does not make sense or scale to do that at a distro like - though that might have happened in the early does of Linux (with local/regional distro forks/derivations) Feb 07 05:51
juhp you can find out more about the fedora-i18n project on the wiki: Feb 07 05:52
juhp I18N Feb 07 05:52
juhp we also have an irc channel #fedora-i18n, which is easy to talk in away from the hustle and bustle of #fedora-devel or ##fedora Feb 07 05:53
juhp ok any questions at this point? Feb 07 05:53
Falstius if the big projects are done upstream, the fedora group does smaller projects that don't have their own teams? Feb 07 05:53
juhp otherwise let's start looking at "languages" Feb 07 05:53
juhp Falstius: well fedora-i18n also does a lot of packaging and maintenance work Feb 07 05:54
juhp and working with upstream and package maintainers about fixing issues related to i18n Feb 07 05:55
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juhp but we also do development yes and contribute to some upstream projects related directly to i18n Feb 07 05:55
juhp we'll probably come to more of that later Feb 07 05:55
Falstius ok Feb 07 05:56
juhp https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/users/packages/i18n-team Feb 07 05:56
juhp is a list of some of the packages we maintain Feb 07 05:57
juhp in fedora Feb 07 05:57
juhp and some of us work on RHEL too of course Feb 07 05:57
juhp * Languages and Locale Feb 07 05:57
juhp in unix and linux systems, the language settings are controlled by what is called locale Feb 07 05:58
juhp you can try running the "locale" command in a shell to see what locale your system (or at least your shell) is running in Feb 07 05:59
juhp % locale Feb 07 05:59
juhp LANG=ja_JP.utf8 Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_CTYPE="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_NUMERIC="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_TIME="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_COLLATE="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_MONETARY="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_MESSAGES="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_PAPER="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_NAME="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_ADDRESS="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_TELEPHONE="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_MEASUREMENT="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_IDENTIFICATION="ja_JP.utf8" Feb 07 05:59
juhp LC_ALL= Feb 07 05:59
juhp excuse me Feb 07 05:59
juhp that is what mine says Feb 07 05:59
juhp which may be different from yours :) Feb 07 05:59
juhp I won't explain all those envvar (environment variables) now Feb 07 06:00
juhp but briefly: Feb 07 06:00
juhp (rtfm:) Feb 07 06:01
juhp LANG is the general variable which can be overridden by the others for specific contexts Feb 07 06:01
juhp ja = Japanese (I used to live in Japan for quite a while) Feb 07 06:02
juhp JP = Japan Feb 07 06:02
juhp and oh utf8 should be UTF-8 ;-) Feb 07 06:02
juhp hmmm Feb 07 06:02
juhp that that "bug" was fixed! Feb 07 06:02
juhp hmm my rawhide box is ok, ah well Feb 07 06:03
juhp so when you install fedora or login with gdm Feb 07 06:03
juhp and you choose the language you are really specifying the default locale for the system or desktop session Feb 07 06:04
juhp you can change the system locale with system-config-language (needs root privilege of course) Feb 07 06:04
juhp ok time is flying so I will move one Feb 07 06:04
juhp on Feb 07 06:04
juhp another focus interest is fonts Feb 07 06:05
juhp * Fonts Feb 07 06:05
juhp if you look through the above package list you will find a lot of fonts for Asian languages, etc Feb 07 06:05
juhp they allow Arabic, Japanese, Indian scripts, Chinese, Thai, ... Tibetan and lots of other languages to display on the screen Feb 07 06:06
juhp these days dejavu-fonts covers quite a lot of scripts, but not most of the above (with the exception of Arabic) Feb 07 06:07
juhp oh I should have mentioned Unicode.... Feb 07 06:07
juhp and don't really have time to go into encodings and charsets Feb 07 06:08
juhp so for fonts coverage I like to go to the front page of wikipedia that lists lots of languages to see how Fedora is doing on i18n fonts coverage Feb 07 06:08
juhp you can try it now in your browser and see how it is for you: Feb 07 06:09
juhp go to http://wikipedia.org/ Feb 07 06:09
juhp and in fact fedora is not doing bad :) Feb 07 06:10
juhp we have coverage for all languages listed there with 1000+ articles Feb 07 06:10
juhp :) Feb 07 06:10
juhp and thanks to the great work of the Fonts Fonts SIG fonts support is getting much better in the recent releases with more fonts and more coverage :) Feb 07 06:11
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juhp which is really important for getting more users in those countries Feb 07 06:11
brunowolff I am seeing codes instead of characters for one of the 1000+ languages. Feb 07 06:12
juhp so that is a simple m17n test: displaying many languages at the same time Feb 07 06:12
juhp brunowolff: which one? :) Feb 07 06:12
brunowolff Kernewek · ភាសាខ្មែរ · Коми Feb 07 06:12
juhp anyway Feb 07 06:13
juhp brunowolff: guess your missing a font :) Feb 07 06:13
brunowolff I try to keep them all installed, but there have been a lot of changes happening lately with font naming. Feb 07 06:13
juhp the situation has been improving gradually since F8 and F11 will be even better Feb 07 06:14
juhp I have to skip over rendering (pango, fontconfig, etc) Feb 07 06:14
juhp next: Feb 07 06:14
juhp * Input Feb 07 06:14
juhp so there are two major system in Linux systems/dekstops Feb 07 06:14
juhp xkb (from X windows) and the kernel keymaps Feb 07 06:15
juhp those form "one" Feb 07 06:15
juhp and the other is input methods Feb 07 06:15
juhp for "complex language" input Feb 07 06:15
juhp ie allowing one to input another language than one's keyboard is really designed for Feb 07 06:16
fenris02 ex: scim for kanji ? or do you mean something else? Feb 07 06:16
juhp and most kbds were only really designed for inputting ASCII or European extensions of that Feb 07 06:16
juhp fenris02: yes exactly Feb 07 06:16
juhp input methods are used primarily for so-called CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean), but also others Feb 07 06:17
juhp and I also mean inputting say another language (eg Russian or Arabic) with a Western keyboard say Feb 07 06:18
juhp that can be done earlier by switching xkb layout or using an input method Feb 07 06:18
juhp but xkb can't handle CJK of course Feb 07 06:18
juhp in fedora in addition to SCIM we have uim and ibus (which is the default in F11 Alpha) Feb 07 06:19
juhp they all allow input in different languages and switching input language between them Feb 07 06:19
juhp older input methods used XIM and were language specific (eg for Japanese only, etc) Feb 07 06:20
juhp and there are backends Feb 07 06:20
fenris02 scim replaced uim - didnt it? why the change to ibus now? (how is it better?) Feb 07 06:20
juhp anthy for Japanese, libchewing for Traditional Chinese, libhangul for Korean, etc Feb 07 06:20
juhp fenris02: not in fedora - uim hasn't been default Feb 07 06:21
juhp I think debian/ubuntu may use uim for Japanese users Feb 07 06:21
juhp fenris02: that is a bit of a long story but basically scim has various architectural limitations that we hope ibus will overcome Feb 07 06:22
juhp best way is to try it - one nice thing about ibus is that it allows individual input methods engines for a language to be started and stopped at any time, which allows a finer grain of control and modularity Feb 07 06:23
juhp for me the biggest problem with input is the disparity between xkb and input-methods Feb 07 06:24
juhp and hope to see some unification at least the UI level some day (hopefully sooner than later), but it requires quite a bit of work Feb 07 06:24
juhp So in the last minutes Feb 07 06:24
juhp I wanted to talk about the L10n aspect of i18n Feb 07 06:25
juhp but if there are any other requests or topics or questions we can also do those? Feb 07 06:25
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juhp for many FOSS projects like GNOME, GNU, the keyword for l10n is gettext Feb 07 06:26
juhp which deals and helps translations to manage their translations in .po files Feb 07 06:26
juhp so most of those projects bundle their translations in their releases Feb 07 06:27
juhp which is nice in that they are self-contained Feb 07 06:27
juhp the downside is perhaps that is it harder to update, add or fix those translations Feb 07 06:28
juhp since that basically needs a new upstream release, but it generally works ok if one can just wait for the next release Feb 07 06:28
juhp the other approach is lang-packs Feb 07 06:28
juhp which is taken by a lot of big projects: mozilla, openoffice, KDE, eclipse to name some Feb 07 06:29
brunowolff Is there something that says to always pull in the language pack for specific languages? Feb 07 06:29
juhp in their way l10n is separated from the main releases and so allows a little more flexibility but also potential lag Feb 07 06:29
juhp brunowolff: in fedora? good question Feb 07 06:30
juhp and an area I should have covered... :) Feb 07 06:30
juhp comps Feb 07 06:30
juhp currently the way to do that is yum groupinstall Feb 07 06:30
juhp eg for Hindi support/langpacks run Feb 07 06:31
brunowolff Yes. So that if someone always wanted say the fr language packs for things included without having to look to see if there was one. Feb 07 06:31
juhp yum groupinstall hindi-support Feb 07 06:31
juhp @french-support would provide the french langpacks, etc Feb 07 06:31
juhp i think f11 yum will support @ abbreviations (ie yum install @french-support) or something like that Feb 07 06:32
juhp ok I am into overtime now... Feb 07 06:32
nirik Thanks so much juhp! Feb 07 06:32
juhp but if you have any questions feel free to ask Feb 07 06:32
brunowolff By the way I was missing a bunch of fonts on this machine and the one I was missing was covered once I installed them. Feb 07 06:33
juhp nirik: ah well guess wraptime now? Feb 07 06:33
---nirik has changed the topic to: Fedora IRC Classroom - Wrap up session Feb 07 06:33
juhp brunowolff: cool Feb 07 06:33
nirik yup. Feb 07 06:33
juhp so thanks everyone and enjoy the fedora i18n! Feb 07 06:33
fenris02 thanks juhp ! Feb 07 06:33
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nirik ok, I'd like to thank everyone for attending. Feb 07 06:34
juhp (see our project page for how to contribute if you want to) Feb 07 06:34
nirik if anyone has questions or comments, feel free to talk to me or herlo. Or bring them up now. ;) Feb 07 06:34
nirik If you have ideas for talks, feel free to add them to the wiki. Feb 07 06:34
brunowolff I try to at least install the language packs so that I can catch and report dependency and conflict problems. Feb 07 06:34
nirik if you want to teach a class, you can add it to the wiki or talk with herlo or I. Feb 07 06:35
nirik anyone have anything they would like to bring up or mention? Feb 07 06:35
nirik Our next classes will be the first weekend of next month. Feb 07 06:36
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nirik ok, thanks again everyone. Hopefully we all learned a bit. Feb 07 06:37
juhp nirik: any long term plans to use SIP say with a whiteboard - maybe others have already asked? Feb 07 06:37
juhp I like irc but sometimes voice might be interested too :) Feb 07 06:37
nirik juhp: yeah, that has been discussed. We would love to do that at some point. Feb 07 06:37
juhp ok Feb 07 06:37
nirik hopefully we can look at using fedora talk for that. Feb 07 06:38
juhp brunowolff: cool the @fonts group should contain all the major default ones, and then some individual lang groups contain more additional fonts for langs Feb 07 06:38
fenris02 juhp, will it also exclude the ones not listed? Feb 07 06:39
juhp fenris02: sorry? :) Feb 07 06:39
fenris02 juhp, mine had a bunch of fonts and other oddpackages that pertain to languages i can neither read, nor speak Feb 07 06:39
juhp ah Feb 07 06:39
juhp no Feb 07 06:39
fenris02 'yum groupremove @korean' wont work ? :) Feb 07 06:40
juhp generally the fonts are harmless and diskspace is cheap these days, but you can remove unwanted fonts if you really want to Feb 07 06:40
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---nirik has changed the topic to: Fedora IRC Classroom - Next Classes coming up 2009-03-07 - See Classroom for more information. For end user support /join #fedora Feb 07 06:40
juhp fenris02: it should Feb 07 06:40
nirik oh, will get logs up tomorrow of the classes today. ;) Feb 07 06:41
juhp but it will also remove fonts from @fonts Feb 07 06:41
juhp thanks nirik for organising the sessions :-) Feb 07 06:41
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juhp fenris02: so you will be left with zero Korean fonts probably Feb 07 06:42
juhp or so Feb 07 06:42
brunowolff What I did to get the missing fonts was use yum to list available packages with 'font' in the name and then installed all of the noarch ones. Feb 07 06:42
brunowolff I was missing 97. I think i have better coverage on my home machine though. Feb 07 06:42
juhp anyway since F8 we have had the @fonts group and it should have a reasonable selection of default fonts to cover most languages available Feb 07 06:43
fenris02 Warning: Group @fonts does not exist. Feb 07 06:44
fenris02 nope. not in f8 nor f10 Feb 07 06:44
juhp fenris02: the groups is called fonts Feb 07 06:44
fenris02 ah! Feb 07 06:44
juhp @fonts is an abbreviation (from kickstart) Feb 07 06:44
fenris02 oic, my bad Feb 07 06:45
brunowolff Are you sure it isn't 'font'? I just tried that and it seemed to try to install about a dozen fonts that were already installed. Feb 07 06:45
juhp but as I mentioned I think f11 yum will support that abbreviation too - someone correct me if I am wrong Feb 07 06:45
fenris02 brunowolff, plural worked here. both f8 and 10 Feb 07 06:45
juhp % LANG=C yum grouplist | grep -i font Feb 07 06:46
juhp it is all a bit confusing, not least thanks to PkgKit ;) Feb 07 06:46
brunowolff I just tried that and it did the same thing; so either works. Feb 07 06:46
fenris02 nice. type1 and 100dpi fonts are "legacy" Feb 07 06:47
juhp yep Feb 07 06:47
*nirik nods. Feb 07 06:48
juhp it is also confusing since yum accepts both the full length names (eg "GNOME Desktop Environment") and the short id's ("gnome-desktop") Feb 07 06:50
juhp I have no idea why "font" works... Feb 07 06:50
juhp IMHO it should not, but anyway Feb 07 06:50
juhp anyway comps.xml is the authority for that Feb 07 06:51
juhp actually seems current f10 yum already supports @ Feb 07 06:53
fenris02 not here Feb 07 06:53
juhp I have yum-3.2.20-5.fc10 Feb 07 06:53
fenris02 yum-3.2.21-2.fc10.noarch Feb 07 06:53
juhp eg sudo yum install @fonts Feb 07 06:54
brunowolff 3.2.21-2.fc10 and @ seems to work for me. Feb 07 06:54
fenris02 juhp, interesting. I had done a groupinfo before Feb 07 06:54
juhp works in rawhide too :) Feb 07 06:54
fenris02 install @fonts works Feb 07 06:54
juhp yep Feb 07 06:54
juhp not list though, hmm Feb 07 06:55
fenris02 groupinfo @fonts fails Feb 07 06:55
juhp fenris02: anything with group is without @ :) Feb 07 06:55
brunowolff For groupinfo you don't want the @, just the group name. Feb 07 06:55
fenris02 info @fonts fails Feb 07 06:55
juhp nod Feb 07 06:55
juhp so still room for improvements :) Feb 07 06:55
juhp I guess just install and remove but it saves some typing anyway :) Feb 07 06:56
*fenris02 nods Feb 07 06:56
brunowolff Time for me to go home; its 0100 here. Bye everyone. Feb 07 06:58
nirik thanks for coming brunowolff Feb 07 06:58

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