[Novalug] How to gut &^*%$& Firefox??

James Ewing Cottrell 3rd JECottrell3@Comcast.NET
Mon Oct 12 14:25:57 EDT 2009


Bryan J Smith wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 03:04 -0400, James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
>> well, of course no, because they put all the wee beasties *in* glibc, 
>> which i believe was also a bad choice.
> 
> Actually, Drepper is very anal on what he adds for long-term
> compatibility.  It's because of GCC 3 and GLibC 2 that we have extremely
> long-term object and library backward compatibility (at least for
> distros that are anal about Enterprise software).  I would not want to
> be in his shoes.  More power to the forks, but they'll have the same,
> tough job as Drepper has avoiding breaking things.

all true, but i don't see why the international stuff couldn't have gone 
in libint.{a,so} from the getgo.

>> over half of red hat's sales are non-u.s.? that doesn't bode well for 
>> linux adoption here, unless people are using centos and fedora instead.
> 
> This statement doesn't make sense at all at all, considering ...
> 
> 1)  The US is only a fraction of the software market.
> 2)  Red Hat sales only comprise of a fraction of Linux usage.
> 3)  That's likely to always be the case.

yes, except that we so often hear statements like "The US has only 5% of 
the world's population, yet produces 80% of the world's 
{garbage,pollution,bad-tv-shows}"

well, then, shouldn't we have 80% of the world's computers? And 
therefore, shouldn't red hat's sales follow that figure?

hmmm, maybe you're gonna say "it's only 50%". ok I guess. but many of 
them still speak English, so we get back england, ireland, canada and 
australia.

> Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has repeatedly stated everything from "I
> don't know how to make money on home consumers" (early 2009 at several
> events) to "I don't think home consumers should ever have to pay for
> their software" (FUDCon 10, 2008 June).  I particularly liked the last
> statement because it puts into the ground what Red Hat's real position
> always has been, that home consumers should get all of their software
> for free (as in no cost).

Cool!

> Beyond that, Linux and open source are about global development, locale
> customization.  It allows anyone in the world to contribute to the
> global effort and anyone in the world to customize it for locale -- not
> just language, but laws, statues, business, etc...

oh great...legal policies to become part of locales?

>> one distribution (to rule them all?) is fine ...
> 
> I've _never_ heard a single person with Canonical, Mandriva, Novell, Red
> Hat _ever_ say such.

I suppose I misquoted you, but then you actually used the word 
"distribution" when you meant "instance". Here is what you said:

BJS: "Frankly I'm fine with internationalization because it means one 
distro for one planet."

I think what you meant to say is "one version of a distro for the entire 
planet"

We're in agreement here.

>> just do a better option at making all that international stuff easy to
>> strip out ... and PLEASE make Posix/C a locale choice too!
> 
> Actually, it's pretty easy to strip out locale if you need space, just
> not with the package system.  I think you're fretting over peanuts.

it's not space that is an issue, altho that is certainly an issue...i'd 
like to have that 1/3 space back for more useful things on the distro.

it's not so much that i am offended that other people would speak 
languages other than english ... it's just that i am forced to deal with 
the ramifications of it. and they are ugly.

i came from the days when character sets were different sizes and used 
different encoding, and were packed into words in varying numbers. heck, 
there weren't even bytes then, you had to pick them apart yourself.

ascii fixed all that, and things have been stable for 40 years or so.

i can't imagine programming in a language where one character isn't one 
byte, and where you need to comb your source for strings, put them in a 
catalog, and use some bizarre method to access them.

not exactly great for rapid development.

> As far as POSIX/C, I think you're thinking of Solaris.  This has long
> been standard in Linux.  The POSIX/C locale is only for legacy
> applications and should be _avoided_ at all costs.

i don't see why POSIX/C should be any less blessed than others. 
basically, it's the same as english, except that things [1]sort 
correctly, and [2] guarantee one character per byte. plus, it embraces 
the latin-1 folks as well.

there are certain cases and people who *simply don't want the 
unnecessary headaches*.

speak whatever language you like ... just funnel it thru an alphabet 
with less than 256 characters.

yeah, i know, i probably stepped into a really big pile of it.

jim




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