Simos says…

I see two issues that plague FLOSS VoIP apps and do not allow their widest adoption. The first VoIP app that gets these, should get fame and glory.

First, the majority of users are broadband users, with a router that protects the inside systems. It is not possible for an outsider to initiate a network connection to a system inside the LAN. If both users that try to communicate have this typical network configuration, then the current tools say something like «You have a symmetric NAT, and at the moment the way to fix this is to either put your computer in the DMZ or enable manually port-forwarding for specific ports.» Ekiga discusses this issue at Ekiga behind a NAT router and directs the affected users (when using the program) to that page. Twinkle (QT-based SIP-phone) shows you a dialog box with the exact ports to enable for port-forwarding on your router.

The issue of a symmetric NAT can be solved in most of the cases by using the UPnP protocol. If the router supports UPnP (most do by default), then the VoIP app can enable the port-forwarding by itself, transparently from the user, and it will just work.

Until recently there was no good UPnP library, which was probably the reason for the lack of support. However, this changed with GUPnP.

The bug report to add (G)UPnP support to Ekiga is Bug 337166 – UPnP for firewall/NAT penetration.

Ekiga already supports STUN and Zeroconf. With UPnP, the vast majority of users would be covered.

The other issue is the difficulty in configuring your third-party VoIP SIP account, that allows you to make inexpensive voice conversations to telephones and mobiles. The reason why it is difficult is because the user has to figure out the SIP server and other configuration details. The terminology is confusing, registrar, domain, etc.

Ekiga has good support in configuring Diamondcard. The user is presented with a Wizard when configuring for the first time Ekiga.

What needs to be done is to put together the details for each provider and maintain a list at ekiga.com. The client would have a copy of the list, and allow on-demand updates. The bug report, Bug 547215 – Ekiga should know all SIP/VoIP providers, allow easy account addition.

Update 11Aug08: Wiki page with PC-to-phone providers and their details.

It appears that Google has not found yet the page of the GUADEC 2008 presentation slides.

If you have slides, put them on http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2008/Slides, alphabetically by title.

GUADEC slides.

There is a discussion going on at desktop-devel about whether the UI strings in the source code should also have non-ASCII characters. For example, should typical strings with double-quotes have those fancy Unicode double quotes?

printf(_("Could not find file “%s”\n"));

instead of

printf(_("Could not find file \"%s\"\n"));

The general view from the replies is to go ahead and add those nice Unicode characters.

Actually, there are UI messages already with non-ASCII characters (the ellipsis character, …) in GNOME 2.22:

1. glade3
2. epiphany

In GNOME 2.24, there are even more (with ellipsis):

1. gucharmap
2. epiphany
3. gnome-terminal
4. gedit
5. glade3

Regarding the fancy Unicode double quotes, there are UI strings in GNOME 2.22 (same list for 2.24) in the following packages:

1. evince
2. cheese
3. epiphany
4. eog
5. gnome-doc-utils

What are the arguments against having non-ASCII characters in UI strings?

1. There might be systems that still use 8-bit legacy encodings. In this case, the UTF-8 encoded may not be displayed properly. However, when I tried to demonstrate this on my system (Ubuntu 8.04), I failed miserably. I downloaded a small GTK2 text editor (called tea), I changed a source UI string to include “” and ellipsis, compiled and installed. I then opened a shell, set LANG to POSIX (or C), and ran the text editor. The UI message was proper Unicode and I could even type non-ASCII in the text editor. I resorted to changing a system locale (I picked en_IN) to ISO-8859-1, then logged out. In the login screen it did not show the 8-bit encoding. If someone has a proper legacy 8-bit encoding system with GNOME (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc), could you please try it out?
2. As Alan Cox mentioned in the thread, the canonical way to deal with UI strings in the source code should be to keep as ASCII, and put any fancy Unicode characters in the translation files (even for en_US, get an en_US translation file).

Is GNOME (or components) used in a legacy 7-bit/8-bit environment?

If there is any reason to keep UI strings in the source code as plain ASCII, speak now, or the Unicode flood gates are about to open.

Update 16 May 2008:There is a document at the ISO/IEC 9899 website (C programming language), that mentions the issue of character sets in C. It is http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/C99RationaleV5.10.pdf.

On page 26, section 5.2.1, it says

The C89 Committee ultimately came to remarkable unanimity on the subject of character set requirements. There was strong sentiment that C should not be tied to ASCII, despite its heritage and despite the precedent of Ada being defined in terms of ASCII. Rather, an implementation is required to provide a unique character code for each of the printable graphics used by C, and for each of the control codes representable by an escape sequence. (No particular graphic representation for any character is prescribed; thus the common Japanese practice of using the glyph “¥” for the C character “\” is perfectly legitimate.) Translation and execution environments may have different character sets, but each must meet this requirement in its own way. The goal is to ensure that a conforming implementation can translate a C translator written in C.

For this reason, and for economy of description, source code is described as if it undergoes the same translation as text that is input by the standard library I/O routines: each line is terminated by some newline character regardless of its external representation.

With the concept of multibyte characters, “native” characters could be used in string literals and character constants, but this use was very dependent on the implementation and did not usually work in heterogenous environments. Also, this did not encompass identifiers.

It then goes on with an addition to C99:

A new feature of C99: C99 adds the concept of universal character name (UCN) (see §6.4.3) in order to allow the use of any character in a C source, not just English characters. The primary goal of the Committee was to enable the use of any “native” character in identifiers, string literals and character constants, while retaining the portability objective of C.

Both the C and C++ committees studied this situation, and the adopted solution was to introduce a new notation for UCNs. Its general forms are \unnnn and \Unnnnnnnn, to designate a given character according to its short name as described by ISO/IEC 10646. Thus, \unnnn can be used to designate a Unicode character. This way, programs that must be fully portable may use virtually any character from any script used in the world and still be portable, provided of course that if it prints the character, the execution character set has representation for it.

Of course the notation \unnnn, like trigraphs, is not very easy to use in everyday programming; so there is a mapping that links UCN and multibyte characters to enable source programs to stay readable by users while maintaining portability. Given the current state of multibyte encodings,
10 this mapping is specified to be implementation-defined; but an implementation can provide the users with utility programs that do the conversion from UCNs to “native” multibytes or vice versa, thus providing a way to exchange source files between implementations using the UCN notation.

Update 7 Aug 2008: According to PEP 8, Style Guide for Python Code, under Encodings, says

    For Python 3.0 and beyond, the following policy is prescribed for
    the standard library (see PEP 3131): All identifiers in the Python
    standard library MUST use ASCII-only identifiers, and SHOULD use
    English words wherever feasible (in many cases, abbreviations and
    technical terms are used which aren’t English). In addition,
    string literals and comments must also be in ASCII. The only
    exceptions are (a) test cases testing the non-ASCII features, and
    (b) names of authors. Authors whose names are not based on the
    latin alphabet MUST provide a latin transliteration of their
    names.

    Open source projects with a global audience are encouraged to
    adopt a similar policy.

 (Emphasis mine)

It is great to receive feedback from users that try out the development versions of distributions (such as Ubuntu and Fedora). Usually, these are small bugs that can easily get fixed. However, there is this bug that looks potent to lead to political dissatisfaction and bad publicity to GNOME.

The clock applet (gnome-panel) now shows the timezones of cities that one selects. You click on the Edit button, you select the city (it comes from Locations.xml - libgweather, which has the coordinates of each city entry), and the applet makes a guess of what is your timezone (each timezone comes with longitude information).

So, if a city is far away from the capital city of your country (and closer to the capital city of a neighboring country), then the applet often proposes the wrong timezone. Considering that in some (=many) cases there is some animosity between neighboring countries, this makes users unhappy.

Launchpad bug report: Bug #185190, Clock applet chooses wrong timezone for many cities (eg Pittsburgh, Beijing)

GNOME Bugzilla bug report: Bug 519823 – Cities associated with wrong timezone

Updated (8Apr2008): The bug has been fixed upstream (thanks Dan!) and most likely makes it in GNOME 2.22.1, which means Ubuntu 8.04 and other distributions will get the update as well. Some countries with regions that have more than one timezone may want to check that the correct timezone is selected for each region.

In Improving input method support in GTK+-based apps, we talked about some work to update the list of compose sequences that GTK+ knows to the latest version that comes from Xorg. From 691 compose sequences, we now support over 5000.

The patch has landed in GTK+ (trunk), and here are instructions for testing.

1. If you have not used jhbuild before, read the jhbuild instructions and install it.
2. Add the following to your ~/.jhbuildrc file

   branches['gtk+'] = None    # Makes sure you build from the trunk of GTK+

3. Install gtk+ using the command (see the comment of James on this post on how to avoid Step 5 below)

   jhbuild build gtk+

4. About 40 minutes later, and about 700MB of space (~600MB for source, ~100MB for installation of files) consumed, you should get a working copy of GTK+ 2.12.
5. You can use this compiled version of GTK+ by running

   jhbuild shell

   This should give you a new shell, and whatever you run from here will use our fresh GTK+. Try running “gedit”. You will notice that the theme is different; it uses the default theme due to the special GTK+. This shell has set special environment variables so that program that run will use the fresh GTK+. The rest of the libraries come from our distribution.

6. If you try to type compose sequences, you will notice no improvement. This is because at the moment jhbuild builds the branch 2.12 of GTK+ and not trunk. We need to download GTK+ from trunk and rebuild.

   cd ~/checkout/gnome2/
   mv gtk+ gtk+-branch-2.12
   svn co svn://svn.gnome.org/svn/gtk+/trunk gtk+
   jhbuild build –no-network gtk+

7. Perform Step 4 and get gedit running.

How to test?

• Setup a keyboard layout that supports a good variety of dead keys. My preference is GBr (United Kingdom). Here, AltGr+[];’#/ and AltGr+{}:@~? produce different dead keys. You press one of these combinations and then you press a letter. If such a combination exists, then it gets printed. For example, the old GTK+ produces öõóôòx åōőxxx. The new GTK+ produces öõóôòọ åōőǒŏȯ (12 dead keys).
• Setup Greek, Polytonic (Ancient Greek). The dead keys are [];’ {}:@ AltGr+[] (10 dead keys). Produce characters such as ᾅᾂᾷῗὕὒᾥᾢῷ.
• Try compose sequences as described from the upstream file at XOrg. For example,

  ComposeKey+(   1 0 )  produces ⑩. Try the same for 0-20, a-zA-Z.

• Other miscellaneous, Ṩǟấẫǡ (using GBr layout)

The next step would be to parse the list of compose sequences and produce a documentation file.

One messy task with GNOME translations is the whole workflow of getting the PO files, translating/updating/fixing them, and then uploading them back. One would need to use command line, and several different commands to accomplish this.

KDE and KBabel has a nice feature that allows you to easily grab all translation files, work on them, then commit through SVN. All through the GUI! It helps a bit here that the translation files for a specific language are located under a single directory.

The current workflow in GNOME translations typically consists of

1. Getting the PO file from the L10n server (for example, GNOME 2.22 Greek) (also possible to use intltool-update within po/)
2. Translate using KBabel, POEdit, GTranslator, vim, emacs, etc.
3. svn co the package making sure you have the correct branch. One may limit to the po/ directory.
4. Put the updated file in po/
5. Update the ChangeLog (either with emacs, or with that Perl script)
6. Commit the translation.
7. (If you committed on a branch, also commit on HEAD)

Tools such as Transifex (used currently in Fedora) take away altogether the use of command line tools, and one works here through a web-based interface. Apparently, Transifex is having a command-line tool in the TODO list.
What I would like to see in GNOME translations, is a tool that one can use to

1. Grab all or a section of the PO files from GNOME 2.22. Put them in a local folder.
2. Use the tools of my preference (translation tools, scripts, etc) to update those translations I need to update.
3. Commit those translation files that changed (using my SVN account), automatically add ChangeLog entries, also commit to HEAD if required.

I would prefer to have a command-line tool for this, for now, though it would be great if GUI tools would get the same functionality at some point. For a command line tool, the workflow would look like

The workflow would be something like

$ ssh-add
Enter passphrase for /home/simos/.ssh/id_rsa:
Identity added: /home/simos/.ssh/id_dsa (/home/simos/.ssh/id_dsa)

$ tsfx --project=gnome-2.22 --language=el --collection=gnome-desktop --user=simos --action=checkout

Reading from http://svn.gnome.org/svn/damned-lies/trunk/releases.xml.in... done.

Getting alacarte (HEAD)... done.

Getting bug-buddy (branch: xyz)... done.

...

Completed in 4:11s.

$ _

Now we translate any of the files we downloaded, and we push back upstream (of course, only those files that were changed).

$ tsfx --action=commit

Found local repository, Project: gnome-2.22, Language: el, Collection: gnome-desktop, User: simos

 Reading local files...

Found 6 changed files.

Uploading alacarte (HEAD)... done.

Uploading bug-buddy (branch:xyz, HEAD)... done.

...

Completed uploading translation files to gnome-2.22, language el.

$ _

Typically, if you want to type characters with accents, such as á, ë, ś, you need to configure a suitable keyboard layout that includes compose sequences for those characters. The produced characters are what we call as precomposed characters; which were included in the early stages of Unicode. Nowdays, the idea is that you do not need to define á as a distinct character because it can be represented as a and ´, where the latter is a combining diacritic.

When put together a character and a combining diacritic, they fuse together, producing a seemingly single character. á is a precomposed (really one character), while á is letter a and the combining diacritic called acute (two characters). You can type the latter á by

1. Type a
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+u, then type 301, then press space bar.

Western languages do not really require combining marks, so the existing keyboard layouts do not use them. Other scripts, such as the Congolese keyboard layout (based on Latin) make good use of them.

This is gedit showing off pango and DejaVu fonts (default font in major distributions).

Line 3 is a bit of an extreme, showing a sandwich of combining diacritics.

Line 4 shows the base character a with the combining diacritics from the Unicode range 0×300 to 0×315.

Both lines 3 and 4 were produced easily with a modified keyboard layout, which is show below.

Line 5 is just me being silly. You can have combining diacritics that enclose your base character.

$ cat  /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/combining

partial alphanumeric_keys alternate_group
xkb_symbols "combining" {

    name[Group1] = "Combining diacritics";

    key.type[Group1] = "FOUR_LEVEL";

    key <AD11> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000300, 0x1000301 ] }; // à   á
    key <AD12> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000302, 0x1000303 ] }; // â   ã

    key <AC10> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000304, 0x1000305 ] }; // ā   a̅
    key <AC11> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000306, 0x1000307 ] }; // ă   ȧ
    key <BKSL> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000308, 0x1000309 ] }; // ä    ả

    key <AB08> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000310, 0x1000311 ] }; // a̐     ȃ
    key <AB09> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000312, 0x1000313 ] }; // a̒     a̓
    key <AB10> { [ NoSymbol, NoSymbol, 0x1000314, 0x1000315 ] }; // a̔     a̕
};

$ diff -u /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.ORIGINAL /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us
--- /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.ORIGINAL      2008-02-20 11:11:13.000000000 +0000
+++ /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us       2008-02-20 13:02:07.000000000 +0000
@@ -492,3 +492,12 @@
     name[Group1]= "U.S. English - Macintosh";
 };

+partial alphanumeric_keys modifier_keys
+xkb_symbols "combining_us" {
+
+    include "us"
+    include "combining"
+
+    key.type[Group1] = "FOUR_LEVEL";
+    name[Group1] = "U.S. English - Combining";
+};

$ diff -u /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.xml.ORIGINAL /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.xml
--- /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.xml.ORIGINAL  2008-02-20 11:27:00.000000000 +0000
+++ /usr/share/X11/xkb/rules/xorg.xml   2008-02-20 11:27:48.000000000 +0000
@@ -3643,6 +3643,12 @@
             <description xml:lang="zh_TW">Macintosh</description>
           </configItem>
         </variant>
+        <variant>
+          <configItem>
+            <name>combining_us</name>
+            <description>Combining</description>
+          </configItem>
+        </variant>
       </variantList>
     </layout>
     <layout>
$ _

Then, you select this keyboard layout (U.S. English) and variant (Combining) in the Keyboard Indicator applet.

Unlike dead keys, with combining diacritics you first type the base character (such as a) and then any combining diacritics.
Our sample layout variant puts the diacritics in the physical keys for [];’#,./. For example,

• a + AltGr+[ : à
• a + AltGr+Shift+[ : á
• a + AltGr+[ + AltGr+’ : ằ

If your language has needs that can be solved with combining diacritics, this is how they are solved.

It is quite important to create keyboard layouts for all languages, and actually make good use of them.

Garrett asks how to type squiggles and dots in GNOME; that is, how to type characters such as á à ä ã â ą ȩ ę ő ǰ ǩ ǒ ġ ṅ ȯ ṁ ė.

There are several ways, and one can choose depending on how frequently they need to type them or how much time they need to invest learning.

① One option is to start the Character Map (Applications/Accessories/Character Map), pick the character, copy and paste it. This is good for rare characters and weird situations such as

┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓

⟁⟁⟁⟁♥♀★★▶◀☆♀░░░▒▒▒▓▓▓▙▚▛▙▙▙▞

The Unicode standard, apart from defining characters for languages, it also defines symbols, dingbats and all sort of things. If your distribution is based on the DejaVu fonts (such as Ubuntu), then you are probably covered for many of these symbols. If you do not have a suitable font, or you use Windows, you will be wondering what the hell I am talking about.

② Another option is to use the Character Palette applet which shows an applet on the panel with a configurable small repertoire of characters such as áàéíñó½©ث€. You select one of the characters with the mouse, and wherever you middle-click, this character is typed. This is an improvement over ①, and good when you want to type often rare characters. It is not convenient to type characters found normally on a keyboard layout.

③ To type characters normally found in a specific language(s), it is good to setup a suitable keyboard layout. For this, it is good to add the Keyboard Indicator applet; right click on the panel, click Add to panel… and choose the Keyboard Indicator from the Utilities section. The US English keyboard layout (Default variant) does not provide any interesting characters apart from those shown printed on the keys of a US Keyboard.

The US English International (with dead keys) variant might be a better option,

Or the United Kingdom layout.

You can get a similar image for your layout when you right-click on the Keyboard Indicator applet, then click Show Current Layout.

Each key in the images contain up to four letters. Starting from bottom-left and going clock-wise, these are the keys produced when

ⓐ you press the key

ⓑ you press the key with Shift (or Caps Lock)

ⓒ you press the key with AltGr and Shift (or Caps Lock)

ⓓ you press the key with AltGr

For example, with the UK keyboard layout, the key G produces g, G, Ŋ, ŋ.

If AltGr + Shift + letter does not work for you, see the FDO Bug #2871 Different results for shift-altgr and altgr-shift.

Using the appropriate keyboard layout is the way to go when writing text that require squiggles. You can either choose a layout with dead keys (meaning that some keys lose their normal functionality), or you can pick a layout that still allows you to have dead keys but are available when you press AltGr + key. For example, in the UK Keyboard layout - Default variant, AltGr + ; + a produces á, or AltGr+Shift+]+e produces ē.

The OLPC uses those four level for the keyboard layout. You can see the all the variations printed on the keyboard. Click on the image, choose Large size for the details.

④ Another option to produce more characters on the keyboard is to enable the compose key, and use compose sequences. A compose sequence looks similar to what we described above (i.e. AltGr+Shift+]+e to ē) but the idea is that we use it for characters we want to be available across different keyboard layouts that you may have enabled.

The compose key is very powerful functionality, thus it is not enabled by default, and lays hidden in the Layout Options tab. I prefer to set it to Menu, but every person has their own preference.

For example,

• Compose key + - + a produces ã,
• Compose key + < + c produces č
• Compose key + 1 + s produces ¹ (Superscript on 1. Try to replace 1 with 2.)
• Compose key + + + - procudes ±

Currently, GTK+ provides 640 such compose sequences involving the Compose key, and hopefully soon it will increase to over 3000.

The Compose key is known as Multi_key in the source code (Xorg, GTK+, etc).

The Compose key compose sequences offer the ability to define smart mnemonics on how to produce characters. It is much easier to type ComposeKey + 1 + s rather than remembering the codepoint value of ¹ (1 superscript). As with many things open-source, there are too many options, and with the Compose key there is the issue of which shall we pick as a sensible default, and how to make it prominent for those who might want to use it.

It appears to me that there should be more effort to promote the functionality that is provided with the standard keyboard layouts (choose a better keyboard layout, produce characters provided in the third and fourth levels, etc). In this respect, Compose key compose sequences should complement after the main discussion on keyboard layouts take place.

⑤ There is a last issue on switching keyboard layouts to cover in a separate post.

When a bug report gets long with many comments, it gets more difficult for someone to get the full picture of what is going on. I’ll attempt to summarise here what’s being said in Bug 321896, Synch gdkkeysyms.h / gtkimcontextsimple.c with X.org 6.9/7.0.

GTK+-based applications use by default the GTK+ Input Method in order to let users type in different languages. Some scripts are very complex (such as SE Asian scripts) and in this case SCIM is used, replacing the GTK+ Input Method. One can even disable GTK+ IM altogether and use the basic X Input Method (XIM) which is provided by the Xorg server, by setting GTK_IM_MODULE to xim. However, the majority of the users have GTK+ IM enabled.

Between GTK+ IM and XIM, the keyboard layouts are being managed by the xkeyboard-config project and Sergey Udaltsov. A keyboard layout is simply a mapping of keyboard keys to Unicode characters, but you can also have compose sequences for some characters using what we call dead keys. When you press a dead key nothing appears on screen but when you press a letter immediately afterwards, you can get an á. This functionality is common to add accents, and there is a big table for these compose sequences (1.3MB) and what Unicode characters they produce.

If you change your keyboard layout (System/Preferences/Keyboard/Layout) to something like U.S. English International (with dead keys), then the ‘ key on your keyboard becomes dead_acute, and the compose sequence

<dead_acute> <a>  : "á"   U00E1 # LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH ACUTE

works when you press ‘ and then a.

There is an issue with compose sequences and input methods; XIM maintains the official upstream version of the compose sequences, and projects such as GTK+ and SCIM carry their own copies of that table.

The issue with GTK+ regarding the compose sequences is that it has a very old version compared to what is available upstream. This is what Bug 321896 is about.

The bug would be have been resolved much much earlier if it wasn’t for the insistence of the GTK+ maintainers to cut the fat and reduce the size of the table (~6000 entries) with clever optimisations.

Tor suggested a clever optimisation; a good number of compose sequences (which looks like <dead_acute> <a> : “á”) resemble the decomposed form (a la Unicode) of those characters. Thus, we can let the user type what she wants, and we can try Unicode normalisation to see if the sequence is composed to a single Unicode character. Lets demonstrate in Python,

$ python

>>> import unicodedata

>>> sequence=[65, 0x301]     # That's 'a' and acute

>>> result = unicodedata.normalize('NFC',"".join(map(unichr, sequence)))

>>> result

u'\xc1'

>>> print len(result)

1

>>> print result

Á

That long line above takes the array, applies the unichr() function on each member so that they become Unicode characters and then joins them in a single string. Finally, it normalises the (decomposed) string to a single character. The fact that the resulting string has length 1 (single character) is key to this optimisation. Over 1000 compose sequences can be removed from the compose table through this optimisation. This includes a big chunk of the Latin Unicode blocks, about a few dozens of Cyrillic characters, all of modern Greek and Greek polytonic, some Indic languages (are they actually used?) and other misc sequences.

Matthias laid out the requirements for the optimisation of the remaining compose sequences; ① it has to be static const so a single copy is shared all over the place, ② the first column (out of six) is repeated too often, thus use subtables, and ③ each row ends with a varying number of zeroes, so cut on those zeroes as well. This also required the automatic generation of the optimised table using a script.

The work has not finished yet, and requires testing of the patch. The high priority testing is that keyboard layouts do not get any regressions (that is, compose sequences with dead keys must continue to work along with any new sequences).

With an updated compose table in GTK+, one can write things like ⒼⓃⓄⓂⒺ and all variations of accents on characters, in an easier way.

I’ld like to thank Matthias and Tor for their support in this work. And Jeff for adding this blog to Planet GNOME!

In new distributions such as Ubuntu 7.10 there is now support for folder names of personal data in your local language. What this means is that ~/Desktop can now be called ~/Επιφάνεια εργασίας. You also get a few more default folders, including ~/Music, ~/Documents, ~/Pictures and so on.

This functionality of localised home folders has become available thanks to a new FreeDesktop standard, XDG-USER-DIRS. xdg-user-dirs can be localised, and the current localisations are available at xdg-user-dirs/po.

A potential issue arises when a user logs in with different locales; how does the system switch between the localised versions of the folder names? For GNOME there is a migration tool; as soon as you login into your account with a different locale, the system will prompt whether you wish to switch the names from one language to another. This is available through the xdg-user-dirs-gtk application.

Another issue is with users who use the command line quite often; switching between two languages (for those languages that use a script other than latin) tends to become cumbersome, especially if you have not setup your shell for intelligent completion. In addition, when you connect remotely using SSH, you may not be able to type in the local language at the initial computer which would make work very annoying.

Furthermore, there have been reports with KDE applications not working; if someone can bug report it and post the link it would be great. The impression I got was that some installations of KDE did not read off the filesystem in UTF-8 but in a legacy 8-bit encoding. This requires further investigation.

Moreover, OpenOffice.org requires some integration work to follow the xdg-user-dirs standard; apparently it has its own option as to which folder it will save into any newly created files. I believe this will be resolved in the near future.

Now, if we just installed Ubuntu 7.10 or Fedora 8, and we got, by default, localised subfolders in our home directory (which we may not prefer), what can we do to revert to non-localised folders?

The lazy way is to logout, choose an English locale as the default locale for the system and log in. You will be presented with the xdg-user-dirs-gtk migration tool (shown above) that will give you the option to switch to English folder names for those personal folders.

Clarification: It is implied for this workaround (logout and login thing), you then log out again, set the language to the localised one (i.e. Greek) and log in. This time, when the system asks to rename the personal folders, you simply answer no, and you end up with a localised desktop but personal folders in English. Mission really accomplished.

If you are of the tinkering type, the files to change manually are

$ cat ~/.config/user-dirs.locale

el_GR

$

and

$ cat ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

# This file is written by xdg-user-dirs-update
# If you want to change or add directories, just edit the line you’re
# interested in. All local changes will be retained on the next run
# Format is XDG_xxx_DIR=”$HOME/yyy”, where yyy is a shell-escaped
# homedir-relative path, or XDG_xxx_DIR=”/yyy”, where /yyy is an
# absolute path. No other format is supported.
#
XDG_DESKTOP_DIR=”$HOME/Επιφάνεια εργασίας”
XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR=”$HOME/Επιφάνεια εργασίας”
XDG_TEMPLATES_DIR=”$HOME/Πρότυπα”
XDG_PUBLICSHARE_DIR=”$HOME/δημόσιο”
XDG_DOCUMENTS_DIR=”$HOME/Έγγραφα”
XDG_MUSIC_DIR=”$HOME/Μουσική”
XDG_PICTURES_DIR=”$HOME/Εικόνες”
XDG_VIDEOS_DIR=”$HOME/Βίντεο”

Personally I believe that having localised names appear under the home folder is good for the majority of users, as they will be able to match what is shown in Locations with the actual names on the filesystem.

There will be cases that software has to be updated and bugs fixed (such as in backup tools). As we proceed with more advanced internationalisation/localisation support in Linux, it is desirable to follow forward, and fix problematic software.

However, if enough popular support arises with clear arguments (am referring to Greek-speaking users and a current discussion) for default folder names in the English languages, we could follow the popular demand.

Also see the relevant blog post New Dirs in Gutsy: Documents, Music, Pictures, Blah, Blah by Moving to Freedom.