Subject: Internationalized Pine

From: Joaquin Seoane <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 17:07:38 +0100 (MET)

Hi all,

We are working in an experience of Internationalization and Localization
of Pine. It is not an easy job, because Pine was written with english
in mind. However, the experiment is going to succeed, so we would like 
to make it available for everybody and keep it in synch with pine development
(or give the code to the University of Washington to incorporate it
to the mainstream).  From the legal notices I read:

      Although the above trademark and copyright restrictions do not
      convey the right to redistribute derivative works, the University of
      Washington encourages unrestricted distribution of patch files which
      can be applied to the University of Washington Pine distribution.

This seems to mean that the distribution of modified sources or binaries
is forbidden. Is it true? 

Joaquin Seoane Pascual     tel: +34 1 3367349
Dpt. Ing. Telematica       fax:   +34 1 3367333 
E.T.S.I. Telecomunicacion  tlx:   47430 ETSIT E
Ciudad Universitaria       email: [email-masked]  
E-28040  MADRID            www:   http://www.dit.upm.es/~joaquin
SPAIN

---

From: David L Miller <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 20 Mar 1997 12:12:05 -0800

On 20 Mar 1997, Joaquin Seoane wrote:

> to the mainstream).

We would be very interested to see how you have done the
Internationalization.  We have this on our list of projects to do, but
your contributions might make the job much easier (and get it done
quicker)... 

>  From the legal notices I read:
> 

Yes.  We encourage you to distribute a set of patches, but please do
not distribute a complete set of modified sources without prior
approval.  We may grant permission on a case by case basis (I don't
recall any request that has been denied).  Contact
[email-masked] for further information.  This is in part to
assure the quality of products derived from Pine and partly to satisfy
the legal requirements that we maintain control over changes to
protect the Pine trademark. 

-- 
David L. Miller <[email-masked]> | God does not play dice with the
Software Engineer, Pine Development Team | universe. -- A. Einstein
Box 354841, University of Washington     |
4545 15th Ave NE, Seattle WA 98105, USA  |
Phone: (206)685-6240  FAX: (206)685-4045 |

---

From: Joaquin Seoane <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 1997 11:44:01 +0100 (MET)

Hi David,

The person working on it is not here now, but I guess we can write
a report for you in the first days of April. We would like better to
give our results to the University of Washington and maintain only the
localization.  As an advance, I can say that:

- We are working in version 3.95 and only on Linux
  (we tried to use MS/DOS and Windows, but we never succeded with
   the compilation).

- However we have translated the help for 3.91 into spanish, but
  needs revision.

- Internationalization of short messages and menus is almost done trough
  GNU gettext. Localization to Spanish too.

- Internationalization of the help should be done with messages
  in a file, not in the code, perhaps thru the same mechanism
  used in MS/DOS. We think this is not inefficient in modern unixes.

- Menu routines had to be changed: they were too english oriented.

- Other internationalization issues will be done with standard 
  POSIX locale libraries (mainly the presentation of dates).

- We use GNU libc features of printf, allowing to reorder the printout
  of arguments.

- The use of international dictionaries for spell checking is
  being integrated (there exist an ispell dictionary for spanish).

- We have not handled the problem of the handling of multiple
  charsets nor Unicode, but we would like.

- We have not made work on pico nor pilot yet.

Regards,

Joaquin