Language support summary/discussion

[Paul Sladen]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Martin Pitt wrote:
> These account for approx. 30 MB worth of language-pack debs [..]
> add langpacks from the top of the list until 20 MB are reached.

[I apologise for commenting when I was not at the -meeting...]

I find it crazy that an internationalised Operating System (one intended to 
have wider support than any other before it) is cutting the allocated CD
space from < 5% down to 3%.

No matter how many applications might be on the CD.  There is little point
shipping them if they cannot be used by the end-user.  Readable strings form
a huge part of the Human<->Computer interface, if they did not, we wouldn't
be expending time and effort translating them.

The sum speakers of those first 11 languages come to approximately 3.5
billion (10^9), repesenting 50% of the World Population.  Since there are
far fewer target computers out there than that, I would hope that those 11
languages would represent a good trade-off/break-even point.

...Possibily with the further addition of those (South African) languages
where extra effort has been put in specially for Ubuntu and given the mental
association of Ubuntu with Africa it would probably match people's
expectations to have them work ''out-of-the-box'' especially given the work
the Shuttleworth Foundation are putting in to push Open Source in SA.

	-Paul
-- 
Is there no safe way to travel?  Edinburgh, GB