Re: [Qemu-devel] [Qemu-block] [PATCH] block: Move away from anglo-centricity

[John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>]

On 04/01/2016 10:50 AM, Max Reitz wrote:
> In its organizational structure, the qemu project is rather
> decentralized: Many different maintainers manage their own more or less
> secluded subsystems. However, regarding languages, it is still rather
> anglo-centric.
> 
> This issue has been brought up multiple times in regards to user-visible
> output such as error messages and has unfortunately generally been
> dismissed, except for some UIs.
> 
> Development always flows from the developer community to the user. Our
> developer community is just as diverse (or at least I hope it is) as our
> user base. Therefore, we should reflect this diversity in our
> development process in order for this diversity to reach our users as
> well, so they can benefit from it.
> 
> The human-targeted part of that development process are comments in the
> source code, obviously. Thus, in order to exhibit qemu's diversity, it
> makes sense for each subsystem's comments to be translated into the
> maintainer's native language.
> 
> Unfortunately, I do not speak Swabian.
> 
> However, as a submaintainer under Kevin, I think it will be fine to
> translate the comments into German, as that is supposedly a language we
> both share.
> 
> I'm certain that this will not hamper development itself by much. First
> of all, many other developers in the block area are able to speak
> German: Markus Armbruster, Stefan Hajnoczi, Peter Lieven, Stefan Weil,
> just to name a few.
> 
> Second, good code is supposed to be self-explanatory, i.e. without
> reading the comments. While it should go without saying that the block
> layer's code quality is simply marvelous, we can now proof that it
> indeed is, by seeing whether people who cannot speak German can still
> understand the code.
> 
> (Although some of our code is rumored to be rather hard to understand
>  even with the comments. But those rumors are purely unfounded, I am
>  sure.)
> 
> In the rather improbable event that someone is not able to understand
> the code without being able to read the comments, they will then need to
> learn German. So this is fine, too.
> 
> Third, this will surely attract a wave of German developers who were so
> far unable to participate in qemu's development because of the language
> barrier. In order to facilitate this process, the next step will be to
> use German commit messages for every commit in the block layer and to
> allow German variable names.
> 
> I am sure if all maintainers follow this process of translating their
> subsystem's comments, variable names and string contents into their
> native language, qemu will become a shining example of what we call
> „Kraut und Rüben“. And everyone knows how much the Krauts like Kraut.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Max Reitz <mreitz@redhat.com>

Acked-by: John Snow <jsnow@redhat.com>

As a follow-up, please consider translating the legacy block devices so
some right-minded developers will be able to understand what's going on
inside of them, because I sure as hell don't.

TIA
--js