[Localization] Turkish keyboard layout

Bernie Innocenti bernie at codewiz.org
Wed May 7 13:15:38 EDT 2008


Arjun Sarwal wrote:

>>  I made a small one line change in Turkey to switch from the F to the
>>  Q layout.
>>
>>  I will apply it once I get back from them.  Unless Arjun would like
>>  to do it, of course.  I'll keep you on Cc.
> 
> Bernie,
> Just wondering, even if we make the change, where will it go ? I don't
> think Update.1 is still open to such changes. So perhaps submit on
> xkeyboard-config upstream because we anyway planned to sync with
> upstream branch after Update.1? Also, will the build for Turkey pull
> from xkeyboard-config upstream ?

I think we should think something like the custom build for Italy.
As inconvenient as it may seem, it's the only way for olpc to
desynchronize the big development cycle from these customer-specific
customizations that need to be done quickly, and require relatively
little time to do.

---WAR STORY---

Some time ago, I had a customer which did POS software for gas
stations in several countries for several customers such as
Exxon, BP...  An almost N*M customization grid!

They would develop new features such as "camera monitoring" or
"support combo discounts" on a main development tree with time
based releases.  Then they had customization branches for each
deployment (such as Shell in Cyprus or AGIP in Italy).

They tried to keep local customizations to a minimum of course,
and they would try to address recurring things with configuration
parameters.

This scheme had a major flaw: each of these deployments (projects
in their jargon) had its own separate project manager and budget.
Each PM was encouraged to do things quickly and economically.
And since making changes right on the branches would save them
some overhead for merging and backporting, they'd effectively
fork way too much and never merge changes back.  As can easily
be seen, this would multiply engineering costs.

---END OF WAR STORY---

If we are smart enough to avoid this epilogue, I see no problem
in creating small custom releases for each country, and even
encourage them to maintain these.

-- 
   \___/
  _| o |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \|_X_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"


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