Bubulle's weblog

Sandro, I was about to write that I wouldn't join you in the club of Those Who Reviewed The Entire Debian Mailing Lists, at least for 2009.

And, finally, in a very last rish, I ùade it and completed my remaining 541 mails to review in the bloody debian-user mailing list.

By the way, you could be interested in learning that I flagged all messages from the "Sponge Burning|A Republican!" giant thread (probably the biggest thread in Debian mailing lists ever) as spam. That's debatable but such huge crap is definitely not something I personnally think belonging to the Debian mailing list archives..:-)

To others: we still need a few other crazy minds to continue cleaning up spam from our lists archives (at least, debian-boot is in the way to become the first entirely spam-free mailing list on lists.debian.org).

Wouter (and Faidon on IRC too) suggest I'm influenced by my (supposedly bad) French habits for writing names and suggest that capitalizing names is a French habit (which is of course bad, just like all French ways to do things...:-)).

Well, sorry to disagree, but there's nearly nothing true in this, IMNSHO. I have never noticed that family name capitalization is more widespread in my own country (which I pretend to know in details, when it comes at its culture) than it is elsewhere. This is more personal habits than anything else. The only thing I can see where one is instructed to use capitals are manually-filled forms, where capitals are often the best way to avoid misreadings.

I though my main point was clear: I don't like name capitalization. I just see it as a practical way to silently tell people "*this* is my family name and *that* is my first name". Actually, this is exactly what several Asian contributors are doing on a daily basis and, from what I've been told, for that exact purpose. So, my "proposal" is just returning them the favor and give them a chance to call me "Dear Christian" and call you "Dear Wouter". Let's say this is a way to show them some consideration. This is somewhat ugly but unless someone has a better proposal, I'll stick with it.

And, on that matter, well, I think that Wolf's proposal to do the opposite would probably lead to weird results. Though let's admit that Gunnar has a point: there's often more than just "first" and "family" names in many places (including mine as my full name is "Christian Jean Antoine Perrier") and that make things pretty more complicated. Maybe we should all call ourselves "dude" or "pal", after all..:-)...but that again is "western" style habits. In some places, that would obviously be considered very rude...even in our friendly free software community.

I just had the case 10 minutes ago, by the way. Had to answer by mail to the Khmer translator of D-I whose name is "Khoem Sokhem". And it just took me quite a while to dig into my archives and find out that I should use "Dear Sokhem" (plus another 10 minutes to confirm that he is a "he".... as I previously worked for months with the former translator before learning that "he" was indeed a "she"...quite a shame for someone who pretends to have some awareness about gender considerations in free software, sin't it?).

Anyway, thanks for this "conversation" and Happy New Year to all my friends around. At least for those who celebrate a new year in the upcoming hours..:-)