An example why open source software is cool

Recently I have set up an Apache Tomcat. As a replacement for the Tomcat manager I deployed Psi-Probe for easy deployment and access to statistics.

Afterwards I installed the production software which needs to add a JVM parameter user.country=CH to have the proper date and time format used in Switzerland. This had a unwanted side-effect to Psi-Probe. The Interface switched to German, no way to switch the language back to English. Since my mother tongue is German, no big deal so far. Really? No! I had really problems to understand what navigation items etc.  are meaning. The German translation was that bad, it actually crippled the application.

I had the choice to either life with it, or change it and contribute it to the project. I made the later. It was about one hour of work. Hours after submitting, the changed translation file it was in SVN. The next version now comes with a much improved German translation.

This is how open source software works. If someone is not happy with the product, simply change the annoying things and submit it upstream. By the way: Psi-Probe itself is a fork of Lambda-Probe which was not maintained anymore from its origin project owner.

Try to do that with closed source software…

Have fun!

5 thoughts on “An example why open source software is cool

  1. Mark says:

    Hi! I wanted to thank you for submitting corrections to the German translation of PSI Probe.

    You probably found this already, but there is a language selector at the bottom of PSI Probe 2.0 for switching between languages. This should override any local settings you have defined. If it doesn’t, that is a bug!

    • Luc de Louw says:

      Dear Mark,

      Thanks for your comment. And *Many* thanks for forking Lambda-Probe! I also convinced the vendor of the production software to contribute to Psi-probe, they actually tought about to fork Lambda-Probe as well, because they have been unaware of Psi-Probe yet…

      Obviously I hit a bug, I tried to switch the language, but nothing happens. The browser language was set to en_US. I’ll file a bug after deploying 2.0.4 (is #72 in the release? Did not got the time yet to check), when back @work and get some time for doing so to collect more informations.

      Thanks,

      Luc

  2. Mark says:

    It’s baffling that the language selector didn’t work for you. If you could file a bug with more details, that would be very helpful.

    The fix for issue 72 is not in 2.0.4, but it will be in 2.1.0!

    • Luc de Louw says:

      Dear Mark,

      It is even more strange: After setting the JVM Option, I was able to select ANY language, Russian, French, whatever, but NOT English. As soon as I choose English, the UI went to German. Please let me know if I can help debugging the stuff..

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