[Mantisbt-lang] Mantis Globalization / Localization

[Victor B. <vb...@gm...>]

Hi all,

I wanted to address several emails that were sent to the mantisbt-lang
mailing list, so I decided to write this email that hopefully
addresses all the issues I wanted to reply to.

First off I would like to thank Alexey and Siebrand for joining the
team and giving us a great push in this area.  Keep it up guys!!  For
anyone who have submitted a translation update before that wasn't
applied, please re-send it.  As you can see Alexey and Siebrand have
brought a lot of energy to this area of the Mantis which we were to
busy to address in such quality.

As part of documenting how the community can contribute to Mantis.
I'm working on clarify the different roles / capacities people can
contribute as.  The first paragraph in the following Wiki page lists
the different roles and what each role involves.  Not all of them are
fully documented yet.  As far as the localization / globalization part
the main relevant roles are globalization developers and translators
(which are documented).  Please read them and feel free to contribute
more information there.

http://wiki.mantisbugtracker.com/doku.php/mantisbt:contributing

I believe we need to discuss any Mantis globalizaiton, localization,
encoding issues and write up wiki articles about what needs to be done
in the globalization area.  Our Mantis Developers will be responsible
for putting this together based on the discussion and helping with
implementing some of the aspects of it.

A quick summary of issues we need to address are:
- All time stamps in the database have to be in a normalized time
zone.  Currently, moving the database from one server to another in a
different time stamp will effect change the times of all entries.
- Users must view / input all time stamps and dates in their personal
time zone, rather than the server timezone.  This includes stuff like
filters, etc.
- All data should be saved in the database in a unified encoding,
rather than an encoding that is based on the user's language encoding.
- We should add some sort of globalization_api that addresses all
issues relating to globalization of dates, time stamps, number
formatting, etc.
- Do we need to update infrastructure for translators?  Is their an
option that will make the globalization developers or translators
easier?  Do we need to consider the gettext / po infrastructure?
- Support locales not just translations.

These are my thoughts in this area.  As a final note, I think we need
to include the mantisbt-dev mailing list in issues that are not
translation specific.  If we are discussing globalization
infrastructure, approaches, etc then we should cc mantisbt--dev.

Regards,
Victor