Re: Summary (Re: A system for localizing documentation strings)

[David Reitter]

On 27 Jul 2007, at 06:44, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Of course, the docstrings within the Emacs distribution would most  
> likely
> all be English, but authors of third party packages could use any  
> language
> they like, just as they can do now.

Technically yes. But it would make sense to design the system to  
suggest English comments as a minimum standard to promote  
collaboration and code exchange. To give an example: I have been  
including a patch in my distribution, but the discussions around this  
patch are mostly in Japanese, including the change log. It has been  
difficult for me to deal with updates, since I can't read the change  
log. If people publish sources with documentation in Japanese, that  
practically contravenes some very basic ideas of the GPL.