[Debtags-devel] The culture can of worms (was: Proposed Debtags goals for Etch)

Benjamin Mesing bensmail at gmx.net
Mon Jul 25 08:32:41 UTC 2005


Hello,

> > Tag: culture::american
> > Description: US localization
> > Tag: culture::british
> > Description: UK localization (or localisation)
> > Tag: culture::canadian
> > Description: Canadian localization
> >  (I can imagine these labels may annoy, eg, francophone Canadians...
> >  but at least they follow existing dictionary-package labelling
> >  practice.  Unfortunately some don't distinguish; does that mean we
> >  need ::english, or do those count by default as ::american, or
> >  ::undef, or what?)
> 
> The culture facet is a huge can of worms.
> 
> It came to life to allow the query '!culture::* || culture::italian',
> that will basically hide all culture-specific packages that are not
> interesting to me.  However, I think that the goal is best served by
> playing a bit better with the locales.
> 
> I chose not to use locale names to just stay out of political trouble:
> my idea is that the name of the culture tag should be the same that the
> locals use to describe themselves (translated to English to avoid the
> need for full-utf8 tags).  Of course to have a culture tag there should
> be at least one suitable package in the archive.
> 
> More shortcomings of the culture tag:
> 
>  - There is no easy mapping between the locale names and the culture
>    tags.  This means that the package manager has no way to
>    automatically hide 'uninteresting' packages without a configuration
>    step.
>  - There are too many tags to show them in a simple list, and there is
>    no easy way to hierarchise them: would euskara be below spanish?
>    palestine below israel?  ...and so on.  Alphabetical ordering, at
>    least, gets us out of trouble.
>  
> So, culture is a facet that I would not want to stretch in any way.  I'd
> just keep adding tags as long as packages arrive in the archive
> supporting some other culture.
> 
> 
> Given this context, let's go back to your question: if francophone
> canadians have some special packages for them, we can add
> culture::quebecois and everyone is happy.  But do we really need
> american, british and canadian just for the ispell dictionaries?
> 
> Maybe british and canadian yes, since it appears that the default
> language is US English.  So we could assume that everything is in US
> English unless there's special localisation support for it.
> 
> It would make sense, but the idea gives me nausea: US English (yet often
> a crappy version of it) could be the default language of untranslated
> applications, but in no way the american culture is the default culture
> in Debian.  The only packages I'd tag culture::american would be the
> jargon file (that's US-specific geek culture, and /me kicks Eric Raymond
> for marketing it as universal geek jargon!), nut-nutrition (it accesses
> USDA nutritional data) and possibly filters, some US specific fortune
> databases, the dict-gazeteer dictionary.
> 
> Uhm...
> 
> This would give us a clue on how to use those tags.  Do you think that
> this view of them would stand?
I am not totally sure what you tried to say int the paragraph above. If
you voted for provide a mapping from the culture to the locals I
consider this to be a good idea. Perhaps renaming culture:: to
localization:: and take the tags matching to the localizations (i.e. de,
uk,...) would reduce your headache. This would support all those data I
was searching for (special characters, number format, translations..).
It would no longer allow to tag packages like the german lawbook, german
tax programs or other.
I love the culture tag to get "german-localization" "german-tex-data"
and other. Thats the main benefit I see in it - search for packages
supporting your localization.

A simple hierachization can be seen after launching KDE the first time.
First they use continents, afterwards western, eastern, central,... to
select your culture. Though I am not totally happy with this approach, I
really like categorizing by continents adding an "other" category for
difficult stuff like geek, nerds and other.

Greetings Ben




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