I would say that bicon and the slang solutions are not competitors, as they provide solutions to different problems. At least in its current form, bicon will not totally replace s-lang support of unicode. However, they will both benefit from coordination.
The plan is to get bicon and slang support packaged for FC4. S-lang will get there easily if the work is pushed upstream, bicon needs a bit more work. Interestingly, I can't find any 'upstream' for the newt package which is used by anaconda and uses slang. Anybody aware of where that is?
I would like to mention that Jermy (Anaconda Maintainer) marked Arabic as no Text mood installation due to the issue we are talking about here.
I am not sure if we should address this here or more appropriate on Bugzilla, I tend to suggest to have this discussion with Jermy and other Engineers in Bugzilla so we can fix it right.
Thanks
Sherif