In this question there is an answer that comments "There was for a long time resistance in some parts of the Linux world to Esperanto, so it seems it was only this year that the Esperanto localization was made official in the libc, the basic library in Linux, although some distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu had Esperanto for a long time." What level of resistance was there, and how has it been resolved?
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What is "Linux geek culture" even supposed to mean? Seems to me like the maintainers of libc saw no need to add it by default. Its also pointed out that some distributions patch in a "eo" locale by default, and that users can patch their own in if required. blaming "Linux geek culture" just seems like silly name calling.– James TNov 14, 2016 at 10:39
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I am not unhappy being called a Linux geek :) Unfortunately this was not so simple a matter. One can patch anything if one is an expert, the point is that not including eo on the libc level made it for all practical purposes unavailable. About a year ago i tried installing eo locale on my Fedora laptop. It took me a while to figure out how locales on libc worked and fortunately I had a debian system nearby to copy from. There is very scant documentation on this. A couple of months later I had to reinstall the laptop, and Esperanto was one of the reasons I just switched to debian.– Jiri LeblNov 15, 2016 at 1:08
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Well the resistance is/was similar as resistance to Esperanto in any other segment of society. In this case, see for example https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=711#c2 or https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=14943 for some of the history. This particular issue has been fixed: https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16190. With libc now (since only this august) including eo locale in the distribution, the main sticking point in terms of basic out of the box language support is resolved. The problem with libc was the fact that the maintainers were actively opposed to including Esperanto locale, refusing to even consider changes done by other people for inclusion.
Though note that Debian, and hence Ubuntu, included EO support for quite a while now.
I remember long time ago (15 years) when I first considered learning Esperanto and I was working on GNOME at the time, I did hear some disparaging comments about EO. Linux was, and especially the companies around Linux were, trying to be professional, and EO was not perceived that way.
Although I have been mostly out of the active free software community for a while, so I am not sure what is the prevailing view nowadays. But note that the free software community is a very wide ranging far flung community with people of all sorts of different views. It is not a homogeneous bunch at all. But a lot of the core people around Linux and related projects work for Linux companies rather than being volunteers, and this does change the way a purely grassroots movement such as Esperanto is going to be received.
