[spambayes-dev] RE: [Spambayes] RV: I18N and L10N

[Tim Peters]

[Pablo Vieira]
> ...
> Since you guys state very clearly that no one should email the
> developers directly I'm putting this here. I just want to ask if
> there's any interest at all in having Spambayes available in Spanish
> or not.

I expect that, like most of the rest of the developers, I think that would
be great, but don't have relevant experience, or time, to give to it.  If I
were you <wink>, I'd announce my *intent* on the newsgroup comp.lang.python,
to attract the interest of Python programmers with real-life I/L*N
experience.  There are people who know pretty much exactly what to do, but
they don't hang out on this list, and this has much more to do with using
Python's relevant features (like Unicode) correctly than with SpamBayes
specifically.  You might have luck asking on a Zope mailing list too (Zope
is a popular web content management system coded in Python, with users all
over the world, and within the last couple years has benefited by many
peoples' intense help with I/L*N).

A problem I know came up repeatedly in the Zope experience:  a 100%
commitment to Unicode can make life much easier, but old-time Python
programmers have to be dragged kicking and screaming to Unicode ("it's
inefficient", "it's wasteful", "it's too hard", ..., all the kinds of things
old people say when they're too cranky to learn new tricks <wink>).  You'll
have my support in fighting that battle, but not really much of my help --
because I'm one of the old farts who still hasn't learned anything about how
to live in a Unicode world.

Asians are likely to complain about Unicode too, but adapting SpamBayes to
Asian languages has many deep problems that European languages shouldn't
face (spambayes splits the body into tokens by whitespace, and that's it --
it deliberately didn't assume 7-bit ASCII English).

I'm not sure whether the Python email package plays nicely with Unicode.
That could be a real problem at the starting gate, if not.