[kadingira] Babel status

[Javier Bezos]

Hi all,

This is the first message on this list devoted to localization and
multilingual issues (babel, polyglossia, bidi writing, etc.). First,
I'd like to thank Mojca and Arthur for creating it. By the way,
Kadingira is Babylon (or Babel) in Sumerian.

Just a few short notes about babel and its current status. I intended
to release 3.10 by December, but didn't manage to do it for several
reasons, mainly:

- I was too optimistic about the validity of the CLDR
(http://cldr.unicode.org/). The original idea was to build a set of
data files generated from it in a more straightforward way, but I had
to discard this approach and rewrite the tools almost from scratch.

- Debugging code involving l3 (mainly fontspec) is a nightmare. This
is delaying the development quite a lot.

- The bidi model in pdftex and xetex is driving me crazy (yes, I know
the efforts already done at this respect, but I still have the feeling
they are just huge hacks, and after analyzing them I think very likely
they are the only way, unfortunately).

Cheers
Javier