Proposed Development Areas for Fedora Core 5 and Fedora Project

[Josep Puigdemont]

I'm reading a suggestion in
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Future
for trimming down core:

"All stuff for personal install and the support for the six main
languages (en,de,fr,es,??) on the first two CDs. Big stuff like
openoffice-lang-support for uncommon langages only in extras?"


That's a bad joke, right?



/Josep (an uncommon language speaker)

P.S.: <nitpick>Don't know who wrote that, but neither French nor German
are in the top 6 most spoken languages (Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and
others go first)</nitpick>

[Gilboa Davara]

I assume that a these "extra" package will also be mastered as a
downloadable ISOs , right?
Having to download 400MB of he_IL packages on each NFS Fedora
installation doesn't bode well for my ISP account...

Gilboa


On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 14:18 +0200, Josep Puigdemont wrote:
>  I'm reading a suggestion in
>  http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FC5Future
>  for trimming down core:
>  
>  "All stuff for personal install and the support for the six main
>  languages (en,de,fr,es,??) on the first two CDs. Big stuff like
>  openoffice-lang-support for uncommon langages only in extras?"
>  
>  
>  That's a bad joke, right?
>  
>  
>  
>  /Josep (an uncommon language speaker)
>  
>  P.S.: <nitpick>Don't know who wrote that, but neither French nor German
>  are in the top 6 most spoken languages (Chinese, Arabic, Hindi and
>  others go first)</nitpick>
>  
>

[Peter Robinson]

>  I assume that a these "extra" package will also be mastered
> as a
>  downloadable ISOs , right?
>  Having to download 400MB of he_IL packages on each NFS Fedora
>  installation doesn't bode well for my ISP account...
>
>  > "All stuff for personal install and the support for the six main
>  > languages (en,de,fr,es,??) on the first two CDs. Big stuff like
>  > openoffice-lang-support for uncommon langages only in extras?"
>  >
>  > That's a bad joke, right? 
My understanding was that it would be part of the main distro but on
another CD image so if you download across the net or as a DVD it
would be of no effect but if you only use English or one of around 6
of the best supported languages you'd have to download the separate
CD. If you install off the net it would make no difference at all, or
if you buy the distro as a CD to save the download if wouldn't matter
either.

Peter

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 02:18:53PM +0200, Josep Puigdemont wrote:
>  languages (en,de,fr,es,??) on the first two CDs. Big stuff like
>  openoffice-lang-support for uncommon langages only in extras?"
>  
>  That's a bad joke, right? 
I hope so. Not because uncommon languages are any different to other
uncommon packages but because many "uncommon language" areas are those where
there is a lack of network connectivity and CD is king...

There are also political issues to be careful with and legal ones. Any language
policy would need to have a clear justification and be transparent to avoid
questions of racism in some countries. It would also want to consider legal
requirements and the business/political climate.

So in the case of Welsh there are good arguments for extras - fairly good
connectivity, relatively small language base. On the other hand you need
dual language support to get into schools/government/some other bodies as
well as to earn happy points with the powers that be.

French would be another example where there are definitive sensitivities and
even bigger questions that need care. Consider shipping English but not French
in Canada, or the size of the boom if someone put French as extras only.

Alan

[Paul A Houle]

Alan Cox wrote:

> I hope so. Not because uncommon languages are any different to other
> uncommon packages but because many "uncommon language" areas are those where
> there is a lack of network connectivity and CD is king...
>   
>  
    Yeah,  but the size of the CD isn't the only thing.

    There is stuff that I like that comes in with the "everything 
install" that doesn't seem to come in with the other configurations,  
and it's not so clear to me how to select these things individually.  
Even though "en-us" is the only language I select in the menus about 
language support,  I get a lot of language packs that I'll never care 
about,  input method daemons that waste tens of seconds at boot,  etc -- 
about a gigabyte of stuff that I couldn't care less about.

    1 GB on the hard drive may seem like small change in 2005,  but I 
end up installing Linux in small places all the time.

    An option to not install unwanted language packs could be 
particularly useful for people in the third world who need one language 
pack but not a hundred others.