Following the good examples of Christian Perrier (Debian l10n leader), I m glad to publish translation status update for LibreOffice 3.5.0 beta0. Information is based on the documentation foundation pootle server. 9 languages at 100%: Catalan (ca), Danish (da), French (fr), Scottish Gaelic (gd), Portuguese (pt), Portuguese (Brazil) (pt_BR), Russian (ru), Slovenian (sl) and Chinese (China) (zh_CN). 15 languages at 99%: Asturian (ast), Bulgarian (bg), Breton (br), Welsh (cy), Belarusian (be), German (de), English (United Kingdom) (en_GB), Esperanto (eo), Estonian (et), Galician (gl), Latvian (lv), Norwegian Bokm l (nb), Polish (pl), Turkish (tr) and Slovak (sk). 1 languages at 98%: Hungarian (hu) 15 languages at 97%: Assamese (as), Czech (cs), Chinese (Taiwan) (ch_TW), Spanish (es), Basque (eu), Finnish (fi), Irish (ga), Gujarati (gu), Croatian (hr), Italian (it), Icelandic (is), Kannada (kn), Marathi (mr), Dutch (nl) andTelugu (te). 2 languages at 96%: Hebrew (he) and Japanese (ja). 1 languages at 95%: Vietnamese (vi) 5 languages at 94%: English (South Africa) (en_ZA), Indonesian (id), Khmer (km), Tamil (ta) and Uighur (ug). 4 languages at 93%: Arabic (ar), Bengali (bn), Catalan (Valencia) (ca_XV) and Korean (ko). 1 languages at 92%: Oriya (or). 1 languages at 91%: Swedish (sv). 1 languages at 90%: Greek (el). 11 languages between 80%-89%: Afrikaans (af), Bosnian (bs), Hindi (hi), Lithuanian (lt), Macedonian (mk), Burmese (my), Norwegian Nynorsk (nn), Occitan (oc), Oromo (om), Sinhala (si) and Ukrainian (uk). 11 languages between 70%-79%: (no list) 10 languages between 60%-69%: (no list) 13 languages between 50%-59%: (no list)
Filed under: LibreOffice

Two days after my first update, here's a progress report about D-I l10n? Status for D-I level 1 (core D-I files):

• 11 languages 100% for all sublevels: bg cs de fr it ja ko pt ru si th
• 1 language 97%: eo
• 2 languages 96%: eu tr
• 3 languages 95%: ba sk zh_CN
• 4 langauges 94%: ast fa ga sv
• 5 languages 93%: bn gu lo nb
• 7 languages 92%: es id nl pl ro sl uk
• 5 languages 91% et hu mr vi zh_TW

So, Japanese and Sinhala reached 100%. Great effort by Danishka Davin, the translator from Sri Lanka, who also sent me impressive pictures of a local FLOSS event, apparently taken at the booth of HanthanaLinux, a local distro based on Debian. I had many privat email discussions with translators. Several of them were used to send me updates, which I committed in the past. I really want them to be able to commit themselves. So, I end up explaining how to svn+ssh on Alioth and remotely debugging their setup. I have to say this is really painful...:-) So, I may end up again in committing what they sent to me..:-(

Tomorrow Prince William will marry Kate Middleton. If we don t change anything he will probably become the King of Australia at some future time, so I think that now is the time to start discussing the options. Walter Block makes some interesting points in favor of longer terms for politicians and for having a monarch to get a long-term view of the national interest [1], he s not the only person to make such points, but he makes them in a better way than most. Of course the problem with this is the long history of kings not doing what s best for their country part of the ownership rights to property is the right to destroy it, so a monarch who owns a country therefore can be considered to have the right to cause the wholesale death of their subjects. There are some examples of President for Life political leaders demonstrating this at the moment. Even with a monarch who is generally a nice person and who has controls to prevent the worst abuses there is the possibility of Control Fraud. In the Constitutional Monarchy system that doesn t happen because a constitutional monarch has little power (no official position of power). But there is still the issue of whether the monarchy is any good. Charles Stross wrote an interesting post about the apparent human need to have a leadership figure [2]. So getting rid of a monarch tends to result in a president getting the trappings of a king, and if things go wrong (as they often do) then they get absolute power until the next revolution. It seems that having one person who is the head of government and the head of state (as done in the US for example) is a bad idea, they can start to think that it s all about them. I don t think that the US is at risk of getting a president for life in the near future and I don t think that Australia will do so if we become a republic, but that doesn t mean that the republican system works well. I think that the Australian system is working better than the US system and I will generally vote against any changes that make Australia more like the US. As long as the House of Windsor provides monarchs who are as sensible as Queen Elizabeth 2 I will vote in favor of the continued rule of the House of Windsor in preference to an Australian republic (if Prince Charles ever becomes king I may support a republic). A Way of Improving Things I want to have an Australian monarch. Someone who will live in Australia for most of the time (as opposed to a distant monarch who visits once a decade if we are lucky). Protocol should dictate that the Prime Minister and cabinet ministers are forced to show ritual respect to the monarch, bowing etc, and no touching. A separation between the person who performs most of the ceremonial functions and the person who actually makes the political decisions should help constrain political egos. When a Prime Minister feels the need to suck up to someone more powerful it would be better to have that person be an Australian monarch than the US president. Tradition has it that monarchs have to be descended from other monarchs (although there are cases of elected monarchs as happened in Danish history). An election for a monarch probably wouldn t work well in a modern political environment, so we need someone with royal ancestry. One possibility is to have a spare descendant of our current Queen become the monarch of Australia, I think it s quite likely that given a choice between remaining a UK prince or princess for the rest of their life and becoming the monarch of Australia there would be someone who would take the latter option and I expect that the Queen would consent to that arrangement if asked (she would have to prefer it to a Republic). Another possibility is the fact that Mary the Crown Princess of Denmark has more children than the Danish monarchy requires [3]. As she was born in Australia it seems likely that her children will have more interest in Australia than most royals and a skim read of some tabloid magazines indicates that her family is quite popular. I expect that if a Danish prince or princess was invited to become the monarch of Australia then this would be acceptable to the Queen of Denmark. In an ideal world there would not be such a thing as a monarchy. But as we don t get to have ideal voters and therefore our politicians are far from ideal it seems to me that the constitutional monarchy is the least bad system of government. Don t think that I am in favor of a monarchy, I just dislike it less than the other options. Finally the Queen is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England. I think that it would be good to have a separation between church and state and therefore anyone who is in a leadership position of any religious organisation should be considered unsuitable to be the monarch.

• [1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/defending-the-undefendable/201101/term-limits-make-me-sick
• [2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/04/make-it-stop.html
• [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary,_Crown_Princess_of_Denmark

All translatable debconf templates for packages in squeeze are translated in Czech, German, French and Swedish. Two other language teams nearly reached that goal and failed to reach it because of flaws in communication with package maintainers:

• Russian is only missing 3 strings in debian-edu-config (they reached the package maintainers too late);
• Portuguese is missing 4 strings in udev (the package was uploaded way too late even though the translation was sitting there for weeks: next time, I'll NMU that package).

So, in my opinion, I will count SIX languages as reaching 100% in po-debconf. Another great effort is currently going on with the Squeeze Release Notes translation, where 8 languages are very likely to be complete (http://www.debian.org/releases/testing/statistics.html) and a strong last-minute effort by a motivated Danish team could likely add one. And, of course, you all know that Debian Installer supports 70 languages with 57 of them with a full translation.

It's summer in Spain, and outside there's a dry heat, but in the hack lab, it's frigid. I'm sitting across the table from Otavio, and each of our laptops is showing the same identical screen of text, editing the same file. Slowly. The file is located in Colorado, and we're fighting serious conference lag, plus transatlantic lag. Type a few lines, wait a minute, hope it shows up, and restart the converter to see if it worked. We're struggling with figuring out how to make it work, and pair programming across the table like this helps -- although we also struggle with each others accents sometimes, so we're eventually mostly communicating via text on the computers. Eventually Otavio rolls off to bed. Later, everyone else in the conference goes to bed or whatever -- I don't really notice. At some point a cleaning woman comes in, and seems suprised to see me. I muster up enough Spanish to ask if this muy fio air conditioning can be turned off. A bit later, I make this commit and then go out, look at storks in early morning light, and go to bed.

r59731   joeyh   2009-07-24 12:30:52 -0400 (Fri, 24 Jul 2009)   1 line
up to r15000; also skip the packages/po accient revs

That would have been 6 am local time. The log shows us back at it by 11 am local. There's so much detail in these logs, and it's hard to tell how any individual bit will turn out useful, but the value in aggregate is undeniable and that's why we struggle to retain it as technology marches on.

---

A few days later and the conversion is caught up to the commits documenting it. Everyone goes home. Later still, and work is done to verify the conversion. Problems are found, fixed. The worst of them involves the Danish language, and absolute evil. Tempers flare, and I have the last argument I'll ever have the pleasure of having with Frans. At some point in there, I do rather more coding in C++ than I ever have before, or ever wanted to. Frans's objections are addressed by that, more or less. We're using a weird tool that was developed as a kind of one-off for another project, but happens to meet our needs pretty well -- but we're stuck dealing with its bugs. And its need for copious handholding and historical research. The file we started out editing grows to two thousand lines, and now covers ten years of odd bits of history.

---

Suddenly it's a year and a half later. I'm in a cabin in winter, Otavio is down in summer, and I'm once again dealing with lag (dialup lag this time). We run the converter again -- one last time. And a time more.. and four or five more "last times". Finally, after a longish day, it's done.

---

This was not a major project, just some little bits of time here and there, maybe a week's worth in total, spread out over a few years and four or five people. It hardly seems worth writing about, just another codebase converted from Subversion to Git, a bit behind most of the other ones. Just thought I'd give you a glimpse behind the curtain.

One of the reasons I like the Digistan definition of "Free and Open Standard" is that this is a new term, and thus the meaning of the term has been decided by Digistan. The term "Open Standard" has become so misunderstood that it is no longer very useful when talking about standards. One end up discussing which definition is the best one and with such frame the only one gaining are the proponents of de-facto standards and proprietary solutions. But to give us an idea about the diversity of definitions of open standards, here are a few that I know about. This list is not complete, but can be a starting point for those that want to do a complete survey. More definitions are available on the wikipedia page. First off is my favourite, the definition from the European Interoperability Framework version 1.0. Really sad to notice that BSA and others has succeeded in getting it removed from version 2.0 of the framework by stacking the committee drafting the new version with their own people. Anyway, the definition is still available and it include the key properties needed to make sure everyone can use a specification on equal terms.

The following are the minimal characteristics that a specification and its attendant documents must have in order to be considered an open standard:

• The standard is adopted and will be maintained by a not-for-profit organisation, and its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties (consensus or majority decision etc.).
• The standard has been published and the standard specification document is available either freely or at a nominal charge. It must be permissible to all to copy, distribute and use it for no fee or at a nominal fee.
• The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty- free basis.
• There are no constraints on the re-use of the standard.

Another one originates from my friends over at DKUUG, who coined and gathered support for this definition in 2004. It even made it into the Danish parlament as their definition of a open standard. Another from a different part of the Danish government is available from the wikipedia page.

En ben standard opfylder f lgende krav:

1. Veldokumenteret med den fuldst ndige specifikation offentligt tilg ngelig.
2. Frit implementerbar uden konomiske, politiske eller juridiske begr nsninger p implementation og anvendelse.
3. Standardiseret og vedligeholdt i et bent forum (en s kaldt "standardiseringsorganisation") via en ben proces.

Then there is the definition from Free Software Foundation Europe.

An Open Standard refers to a format or protocol that is

1. subject to full public assessment and use without constraints in a manner equally available to all parties;
2. without any components or extensions that have dependencies on formats or protocols that do not meet the definition of an Open Standard themselves;
3. free from legal or technical clauses that limit its utilisation by any party or in any business model;
4. managed and further developed independently of any single vendor in a process open to the equal participation of competitors and third parties;
5. available in multiple complete implementations by competing vendors, or as a complete implementation equally available to all parties.

A long time ago, SUN Microsystems, now bought by Oracle, created its Open Standards Checklist with a fairly detailed description.

Creation and Management of an Open Standard

• Its development and management process must be collaborative and democratic:
  • Participation must be accessible to all those who wish to participate and can meet fair and reasonable criteria imposed by the organization under which it is developed and managed.
  • The processes must be documented and, through a known method, can be changed through input from all participants.
  • The process must be based on formal and binding commitments for the disclosure and licensing of intellectual property rights.
  • Development and management should strive for consensus, and an appeals process must be clearly outlined.
  • The standard specification must be open to extensive public review at least once in its life-cycle, with comments duly discussed and acted upon, if required.

Use and Licensing of an Open Standard

• The standard must describe an interface, not an implementation, and the industry must be capable of creating multiple, competing implementations to the interface described in the standard without undue or restrictive constraints. Interfaces include APIs, protocols, schemas, data formats and their encoding.
• The standard must not contain any proprietary "hooks" that create a technical or economic barriers
• Faithful implementations of the standard must interoperate. Interoperability means the ability of a computer program to communicate and exchange information with other computer programs and mutually to use the information which has been exchanged. This includes the ability to use, convert, or exchange file formats, protocols, schemas, interface information or conventions, so as to permit the computer program to work with other computer programs and users in all the ways in which they are intended to function.
• It must be permissible for anyone to copy, distribute and read the standard for a nominal fee, or even no fee. If there is a fee, it must be low enough to not preclude widespread use.
• It must be possible for anyone to obtain free (no royalties or fees; also known as "royalty free"), worldwide, non-exclusive and perpetual licenses to all essential patent claims to make, use and sell products based on the standard. The only exceptions are terminations per the reciprocity and defensive suspension terms outlined below. Essential patent claims include pending, unpublished patents, published patents, and patent applications. The license is only for the exact scope of the standard in question.
  • May be conditioned only on reciprocal licenses to any of licensees' patent claims essential to practice that standard (also known as a reciprocity clause)
  • May be terminated as to any licensee who sues the licensor or any other licensee for infringement of patent claims essential to practice that standard (also known as a "defensive suspension" clause)
  • The same licensing terms are available to every potential licensor
• The licensing terms of an open standards must not preclude implementations of that standard under open source licensing terms or restricted licensing terms

It is said that one of the nice things about standards is that there are so many of them. As you can see, the same holds true for open standard definitions. Most of the definitions have a lot in common, and it is not really controversial what properties a open standard should have, but the diversity of definitions have made it possible for those that want to avoid a level marked field and real competition to downplay the significance of open standards. I hope we can turn this tide by focusing on the advantages of Free and Open Standards.

You probably all know du from GNU Coreutils. But there s more than just du around in Debian. du xdu First there is xdu, which displays du output piped into it graphically, even if du is running on some other box with the output coming over an ssh connection:

$ du   xdu
$ ssh server-without-xlibs du some-directory   xdu

Clicking on any directory except the topmost zooms into that directory. Pressing n sorts by size and s toggles the display of sizes in numbers. xdiskusage xdiskusage seems to be a fork of xdu or at least shares some GUI code with it as it looks and behaves quite similar. But the GUI looks nicer, more modern and you don t need to pipe the output of du into it. It collects the disk usage of a given directory itself. ncdu And then there is ncdu, the ncurses du . (It has nothing to do with the German party CDU . You can easily remember that as Not CDU . ;-) It shows you the disk usage of files and subdirectories in the given directory already sorted by size, optionally displaying also ascii art bars and/or percentage (by pressing g one or more times) for better comparision between file and directory sizes. And all easily and intuitively to navigate in an ncurses text-mode user interface.

ncdu 1.3 ~ Use the arrow keys to navigate, press ? for help
--- /home/abe/debian/webwml ------------------------------------
                             /..
   70.2MB [20.0% ##########] /english
   40.9MB [11.7% #####     ] /french
   35.0MB [10.0% ####      ] /german
   30.2MB [ 8.6% ####      ] /swedish
   26.6MB [ 7.6% ###       ] /japanese
   23.2MB [ 6.6% ###       ] /spanish
   21.5MB [ 6.1% ###       ] /portuguese
   19.8MB [ 5.6% ##        ] /danish
   15.2MB [ 4.3% ##        ] /italian
    9.8MB [ 2.8% #         ] /russian
    8.8MB [ 2.5% #         ] /polish
    6.5MB [ 1.8%           ] /finnish
    5.8MB [ 1.6%           ] /chinese
    4.4MB [ 1.3%           ] /catalan
    4.3MB [ 1.2%           ] /dutch
    3.7MB [ 1.0%           ] /korean
    3.4MB [ 1.0%           ] /ukrainian
    3.0MB [ 0.9%           ] /czech
    2.6MB [ 0.7%           ] /croatian
    2.6MB [ 0.7%           ] /bulgarian
    2.4MB [ 0.7%           ] /norwegian
    1.7MB [ 0.5%           ] /hungarian
    1.6MB [ 0.4%           ] /romanian
    1.2MB [ 0.3%           ] /greek
    1.2MB [ 0.3%           ] /turkish
    1.1MB [ 0.3%           ] /slovak
  576.0kB [ 0.2%           ] /Perl
  556.0kB [ 0.2%           ] /arabic
  428.0kB [ 0.1%           ] /lithuanian
 Total disk usage: 351.1MB  Apparent size: 351.1MB  Items: 70653                                                      

And yes, I uploaded the two screenshots shown above also to screenshots.debian.net as both tools had no screenshots available yet.

A few days ago I had the mixed pleasure of bying a new digital camera, a Canon IXUS 130. It was instructive and very disturbing to be able to verify that also this camera producer have the nerve to specify how I can or can not use the videos produced with the camera. Even thought I was aware of the issue, the options with new cameras are limited and I ended up bying the camera anyway. What is the problem, you might ask? It is software patents, MPEG-4, H.264 and the MPEG-LA that is the problem, and our right to record our experiences without asking for permissions that is at risk. On page 27 of the Danish instruction manual, this section is written:

This product is licensed under AT&T patents for the MPEG-4 standard and may be used for encoding MPEG-4 compliant video and/or decoding MPEG-4 compliant video that was encoded only (1) for a personal and non-commercial purpose or (2) by a video provider licensed under the AT&T patents to provide MPEG-4 compliant video. No license is granted or implied for any other use for MPEG-4 standard.

In short, the camera producer have chosen to use technology (MPEG-4/H.264) that is only provided if I used it for personal and non-commercial purposes, or ask for permission from the organisations holding the knowledge monopoly (patent) for technology used. This issue has been brewing for a while, and I recommend you to read "Why Our Civilization's Video Art and Culture is Threatened by the MPEG-LA" by Eugenia Loli-Queru and "H.264 Is Not The Sort Of Free That Matters" by Simon Phipps to learn more about the issue. The solution is to support the free and open standards for video, like Ogg Theora, and avoid MPEG-4 and H.264 if you can.

Joe Hansen reported the Debian bug #590000 on Thursday July 22nd, against the uif package. Guess what? That was a localization bug..:-)... Joe is doing a lot of work for Danish localization in Debian since a few months and I'm happy to see him rewarded byt this little "success". Bug #580000 was reported as of May 2nd. It is now confirmed that the rate for 10,000 bugs is more 2.5 months than 2 months as it was in the past. So, now my next post about this topic will be about Bug #600000 for which a bet was placed two years ago. I already lost the bet as I predicted it to happen on June 30th. Either Ren Mayorga or Josu Abarca are likely to win this bet, more likely Ren , I would say. One should note that all people who did bet where optimistic about the moment where bug #600000 would be reported.

For many activists in net-politics it is apparent that the fight against child pornography is just an excuse for establishing a EU-wide content filtering infrastructure. This infrastructure for content filtering can be used to filter other content than child pornography as well. For example politicians in Germany already requested blocking gambling sites, Nazi sites, left extremistic political sites and others, when we had that kind of discussion last year over here. The proposal of a law putting up stop pages in front of child pronography sites by former minister for family Ursula "Zensursula" von der Leyen passed the parliament, but shortly after last years parliament elecetion all political parties didn't want that law anymore.
EU commissioner Cecilia "Censilia" Malmstr m introduced a similar proposal for a EU-wide blocking iinitiative a short while ago, as you might now. Christian Engstr m, member of the EU parliament of the swedish Pirate Party, wrote today on his blog that content right industry welcomes child pornography as a way to introduce content filter and blocking infrastructure:

Child pornography is great, the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites .

The venue was a seminar organized by the American Chamber of Commerce in Stockholm on May 27, 2007, under the title Sweden A Safe Haven for Pirates? . The speaker was Johan Schl ter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations, like IFPI and others.

[...]

Start with child porn, which everybody agrees is revolting, and find some politicians who want to appear like they are doing something. Never mind that the blocking as such is ridiculously easy to circumvent in less than 10 seconds. The purpose at this stage is only to get the politicians and the general public to accept the principle that censorship in the form of filters is okay. Once that principle has been established, it is easy to extend it to other areas, such as illegal file sharing. And once censorship of the Internet has been accepted in principle, they can start looking at ways to make it more technically difficult to circumvent.

If you already have not, then please act now and contact your local EU representive and kindly ask to refuse this directive of Malmstr m and enlighten them by supplying arguments such those MOGIS (MissbrauchsOpfer Gegen InternetSperren, abuse survivors against internet blocking) put up on their webpage (English and other languages).

The abuse of childs and the documentation of such abuse (child pornography is a bad term anyway) needs to be stopped! But access blocking is the wrong direction. Better take care of a more effective criminal prosecution. Documentation of child abuse needs to get removed from the web and the producers needs to get arrested.

So, please act now!

P.S.: there's a nice video on http://cleanternet.org/

Of course, one would expect me to react to this post. Apparently, from my cumulated experience, joking about funny translations is a very widespread game among german-speaking developers (of course, as everybody knows, us French do translate everissing and no single Frainche DiDi will make such fun abaouttel10n wouhorke, aha). I'd say: more generally widespread among people .who jargonize about computing so often in their daily work that they often forget that not everybody, even in a country where people are as clever about English as German/Austrian/Swiss folks are (we all know that 100% population in these places speak a very perfect English) do understand what "downgrade" means. Seriously, "funny" translations are our (translators) daily nightmare. We hate them because we know people hate us (or make jokes about our work) when they face them. The example taken by Patrick is a nice case as "downgrade" is tricky for all of us. For instance, French translators have chosen "revenir la version pr c dente" as "bring back to former version". This is about the only "right" way to say what's being done ("d grader" is another option but that has a negative connotation). Of course, I often *hear* people (incl. me) say "downgrader" which is an horrible neologism....and of course doesn't say anything to people who are clueless in English. English is, unfortunately, often a very compact language. This is our daily pain. So, as German translation of "to downgrade", what do *you* propose, Patrick? "Downgradieren"? Tricky, eh? Taken from APT for "downgrade":

• German: deaktualizieren
• French: revenir la version pr c dente
• Spanish: desactualizar
• Italian: retrocedere
• Danish: nedgraderingen (hope this is the inifitive, just guessing)
• Dutch: degraderen
• etc.

Hint: you can see this with "apt-get source aptitude" and look in po/ for you favorite language. That sounds funny to you? Fine. But as usual in free software, please report.....and patches welcome...

Caution: Latin American rant ahead. With my Latin American Spanish keyboard (xkb code "la") I can type in:

• English: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
• Spanish, Galician, Basque, Quechua:
• Catalan/Valencian and Occitan: l l
• French:
• Italian:
• Dutch:
• German:
• Swedish:
• Danish and Norwegian:
• Icelandic:
• Finnish: (apparently, the untypable are only used in loan words)

But not in:

• Portuguese: I can't type or (no dead_tilde)
• Guaran : I can't type g (no dead_tilde).

It turns out that for some people it's more important to have 3 (yes THREE) asciitilde (~) in the Latin American Spanish keyboard, than to allow people to write in the language spoken by 51% of South American people, or the second official language in Paraguay (spoken by 94% of the population). The same thing happens with the Traditional Spanish keyboard (code "es"), which was initially thought only for Spain, but is now widely sold all over Latin America. It includes 2 asciitilde, but no dead_tilde. I think this is outrageous and I'm very very pissed about this. As can be seen in the posts I've made to the bugs in Debian and in FreeDesktop. However, it looks like we Latin Americans are overwhelmed by the amount of Spanish people in Free Software (particularly in Debian) who don't care that Brazil is the biggest economy in the region nor that other native american languages can't be written without a dead_tilde. For the record, there are some other European languages, that can't be written with the Latin American keyboard, such as:

• Polish: I can't type , only
• Czech: I can't type , only
• Romanian: I can't type , only

But in this case, it makes much more sense to not be able to write those than not being able to write Portuguese or Guaran , and it's not like there are 3 macrons and no dead_macrons, there are no macrons at all (same for all others).

---

After a short discussion time, my proposals have been ACK'ed and we will have 63 languages supported, including English, in Debian Installer for Lenny. Etch had 58 supported languages. The final winners are (alphabetical order of ISO code): Amharic, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bengali, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Welsh, Danish, German, Dzongkha, Greek, English, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French, Irish, Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Latvian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokm l, Nepali, Dutch, Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Northern Sami, Slovak, Slovenian, Albabian, Serbian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Tagalog, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Wolof, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese Newcomers for Lenny are: Amharic, Welsh (back), Irish, Marathi, Northern Sami, Serbian We lost Estonian which was in Etch. Those that missed the deadline are of course all other languages of the world. We will put focus on languages where an effort started at some moment but could not be complete enough: Afrikaans, Estonian, Persian, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada, Kashmiri, Lao, Malagasy, Malay, Sanskrit, Secwepemctsin, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa Many thanks to all translators for this final effort. Thanks also to all people who urgently popped up last week to complete the translations for languages that were "orphaned". I hope this will bring us more translators...:-) I keep special thanks to Frans Pop here. He is, along with me, the author of the code that allows us to split D-I translations in "sublevels", allowing translators to focus on the most "important" messages. He also implemented prior warnings when users pick up a language where some less important screens aren't translated. This also allows us to more easily keep partly complete translations, or activate languages earlier. Without this, 11 languages should have been dropped.

(including English!) The string freeze of Debian Installer officially ended at 23:59 yesterday (Sept. 20th). Indeed, this was extended a bit to today, with agreement by Otavio Salvador who I thank for this. That allowed Zak to "save" Tagalog and also the Welsh and Latvian translators to polish their work. We now have to decide about some of these languages: those that failed to meet the release criteria but were formerly activated in D-I. There are four such languages: Amharic, Welsh, Estonian and Northern Sami. Please find below the mail I just sent to debian-i18n and debian-boot. I promised that this discussion would happen in public. It will (but it will be short as we can't delay the release of the installer for ages....and I think that my proposals are reasonable!)

First of all, the numbers as of Sunday Sept. 21st 09:32 UTC (date of
the last commit with an l10n update):
Languages meeting the release criteria: 59
------------------------------------------
Already activated and complete for level 1: 51
 Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Bosnian, Catalan, Czech, Danish,
 German, Dzongkha, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Basque, Finnish, French,
 Galician, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Croatian, Hungarian, Indonesian,
 Italian, Japanese, Georgian, Khmer, Korean, Lithuanian, Latvian,
 Macedonian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokm l, Nepali, Dutch,
 Norwegian Nynorsk, Punjabi, Polish, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese,
 Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Albabian, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish,
 Vietnamese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
Already activated and complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 6
Bengali, Kurdish, Slovenian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof
Not yet activated languages complete for sublevels 1 and 2: 2
 (the mail in -i18n and -boot says 3 but this is an error by me)
Irish, Serbian
Languages failing to meet the release criteria: 15
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Activated languages: 4
Amharic, Welsh, Estonian, Northern Sami
Not yet activated languages: 11
Afrikaans, Persian, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada,
Malagasy, Malay, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa
Discussion
----------
(careful people will notice that I moved Welsh down to "failed to meet
the release criteria" as this is what is technically correct)
Nothing to discuss for the 57 already activated languages that meet
the defined criteria. They'll be kept or first activated in the RC1
release of Debian Installer.
Similarly, nothing to discuss for the 11 languages that were not
activated and haven't made it. They will remain unactivated.
Two languages should be activated as they have met the release
criteria for the first time during the string freeze: Irish and Serbian.
This adds more load (and size changes) to D-I but I really don't see
any reason to not follow our own rules there.
The discussion comes for the 4 languages that fail to meet the release
criteria. Here are my proposals with some rationale:
Amharic: 
  I would really dislike deactivating Amharic because it's highly
  symbolic to have the language of Ethiopia activated. We have so few
  African languages. Also, the translation is nearly complete and the
  translator was well coping with updates until July. The missing
  stuff for Amharic in sublevels 1 and 2 are messages about loading
  drivers or firmware from removable media, the rescue mode stuff for
  the graphical installer and some messages that briefly appear during
  finish-install. A little bit more important is the message warning
  that the boot partition is not ext2 or ext3, added in August by
  tbm. I think this is not enough to drop out one year of efforts for
  the translator
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Amharic.
Welsh:
  Only five strings are missing in sublevels 1 and 2 because of the
  small experience of PO files by the person who completed the
  translation during last week. One will make the regular user login
  name screen to be in English and others will make the GRUB password
  screen to be in English as well, that's all.
  Additionnally, we can safely assume that all potential users of
  Welsh have good skills in English...and will therefore very easily
  cope with these screens.
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Welsh.
Estonian:
  The translation had NO update since Etch. The last update is dated
  back to Feb. 17th 2007. I haven't got any sign of life from the
  translator and no Estonian users have volunteered to maintain the
  translation.
  Missing strings are in many places, including several screens that
  appear in default installs. Even though one can assume that the
  skills of the average Linux user in Estonia is fairly good, I think
  this is not enough to throw users in a big mix of English and
  Estonian.
  As a consequence, I propose to DROP Estonian.
Northern Sami:
  The translation is very incomplete. With about any other language,
  that would be a reason to drop the translation.
  However, a few reasons make me suggest keeping it:
   - Northern Sami is mostly used in Norway and D-I will fall back
     to Norwegian Bokm l which is understood by all potentials users
     as it is teached in all Norwegian schools. 
   - Users will be warned, *in Sami*, about this situation
   - The choice of Sami will be kept in localechooser even if the
     translations are dropped. This is on request of Debian Edu
     developers to avoid them to develop a special boot floppy
     to offer the choice of Sami (a requirement for Norwegian
     schools). I personnally think this is a reward to Debian Edu and
     its ancestor Skolelinux for their initial involvement in the
     development of D-I
  As a consequence, I propose to KEEP Northern Sami.
I understand that these choices may be debatable and some may sound
slightly subjective. I however think this is the best way to be fair
with translators' efforts without compromising the quality of D-I.
Please note that the final word on this will be by D-I release
managers...but advices are very much welcomed.

Only four days are left and these languages, as well as Amharic, Northern Sami, Slovenian, Albanian, Tagalog are in very high danger of being disabled in Debian Installer. For Bengali, I still have some hope as someone volunteered to fill in the gap left. Catalan is still missing its 5 miserable strings but I guess I won't have the guts to disable it just because it is missing strings that warn users that the translation could be incomplete (feel free to laugh at this paradox but if you think this is stupid, just also feel free to come and fix that bug or complete the damn translation). I can now confess that we will reach a point where we will have less translations for the installer in Lenny than we had in Etch. I don't see any reason for this to change in four days. And, yes, I call this sad news as we (particularly Frans) did a lot of improvement in D-I to lower down the requirements. PS: for those who wonder why I mention only 7 languages in that post's title, I indeed picked up those I still have a small hope I can wake up someone to complete the work in these last four days.

There's only one week left for D-I translation updates. I wholeheartedly thank Otavio who agreed for such a long string freeze as it allowed me to do my best to get translations completed. And this is a huge communication effort, considering how easily the translators vanish... 46 languages are now qualified for the release, without discussion. Since my last blog entry, welcome back to Greek, Esperanto, Hungarian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Wolof. There are still uncertainties for 14 languages: Amharic, Bengali, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Estonian, Kurdish, Latvian, Macedonian, Northern Sami, Slovenian, Albanian, Tagalog, Ukrainian Again, several of these have *very few missing strings*. In short, if your language is among these 14, there are 6.5 days left (the end of the translation update round is on Saturday 20th midnight UTC). RUSH! What will happen in 6.5 days? I will examine the situation of each of those languages and discuss it with the D-I release managers. On a case by case basis, we will decide together to keep them or not. Etch has 58 supported languages (English included). Lenny currently has 47 that are sure. Will Lenny be the first Debian release ever with *less* supported languages in D-I than the former release? It would give some groung to my claim that Debian translators are currently escaping somewhere else (guess where?).

Three days after I posted my last blog entry about it, a great progress was made about translation completeness for D-I. We jumped from 34 languages meeting the release criteria up to 41. Shaking out translators seems to be efficient even though t requires a big investment in time. So, welcome back to Spanish, Indonesian, Georgian, Hebrew, Khmer, Nepali, Simplified Chinese. There are still uncertainties for: Amharic, Bengali, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Greek, Esperanto, Estonian, Hungarian, Kurdish, Latvian, Macedonian, Norwegian Nynorsk, Northern Sami, Slovenian, Albanian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof Several of these have *very few missing strings* (as a matter of example, Catalan is only missing the strings....that warn users that the translation might be incomplete...interesting chicken-and-egg situation which could be easily solved by completing 5 miserable strings). 12 days left (the end of the translation update round is on Saturday 20th midnight UTC)....hurry!

After more than one week of string freeze for Debian Installer, here's the status (I post it daily on debian-boot and debian-i18n mailing lists). 15 days are left before the end of the string freeze 34 Languages meet the release criteria: Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, German, Dzongkha, Basque, Finnish, French, Galician, Gujarati, Hindi, Croatian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Malayalam, Marathi, Norwegian Bokm l, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Brazilian Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Traditional Chinese 27 currently activated Languages *fail* and risk to be disabled et the end of the freeze: Amharic, Bengali, Bosnian, Catalan, Danish, Greek, Esperanto, Spanish, Estonian, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Georgian, Khmer, Kurdish, Latvian, Macedonian, Nepali, Norwegian Nynorsk, Northern Sami, Slovenian, Albanian, Tagalog, Ukrainian, Wolof, Simplified Chinese 14 more languages are under work but will probably not make it: Afrikaans, Welsh, Persian, Irish, Armenian, Icelandic, Kazakh, Kannada, Malagasy, Malay, Serbian, Telugu, Urdu, Xhosa In short, this summarizes to "hurry if you don't want your language disappear from D-I"...:-)

I attended the Open Nordic Conference in Norway in June, a conference that brought together people from Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. Attending the conference allowed me to find out what's going on with FOSS in Northern Europe. What I found interesting is that there was a lot of talk about using FOSS in the public sector. A number of countries are working on repositories to exchange software, in particular for public administration. One example is the Software Exchange (softwareborsen.dk), a project by the Danish National Software Knowledge Centre to promote the use of FOSS in Danish public administration. The Norwegian software exchange (delingsbazaren.no) plays a similar role in Norway. It seems as if every country is working on their own software repository to share FOSS. As such, it's great to see that the European Commission is taking a step towards bringing everyone together by introducing the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) for European public administrations. The goal of OSOR is to provide a platform for the exchange of information, experiences and FOSS code for the use in public administrations. OSOR will officially launch at the Open Source World Conference in Malaga in October. I've always thought that there is not enough cooperation and communication between European countries, so I have high hopes for OSOR. (Originally published on FOSSBazaar)