Language support summary/discussion

[Shot (Piotr Szotkowski)]

Hello.

Martin Pitt:

> (1) Which language packs should be shipped on the install CD?
> 
> According to [1], the most widely spoken languages in the world are:

As Thibaut, I don't think this is the right criterion. I'm not even
sure the secondary-language speaker base is a right criterion; IMHO
the logical choice would be to base the choice of the shipped langpacks
on the actual userbase, but I guess this is hard to measure (does popcon
report locale data?).

That aside, though, how hard would it be to do a langpack-customised
install and/or live CDs? I understand that my view is very biased here,
and if we wanted equality then this idea would be very hard to get
right (hmm, Africa), but from my local point of view, a Central-
and Eastern-European Ubuntu CDs could be something really great.

The post-soviet european block has a couple of distinctive (ok, I'm
guessing here, but I think I might be right) features. These are mid-
to small-size countries with their own languages, not really spoken
outside the borders; at the same time, western languages were not
actively taught for two generations, so even English-speaking people
are in minority.

What I have in mind is a Central- and Easter-European Ubuntu install CD,
which could ship with, for example, the following langpacks: Lithuanian
(lt), Czech (cs), Bulgarian (bg), Russian (ru), Albanian (sq), Ukrainian
(uk), Serbian (sr), Polish (pl) and Hungarian (hu). The choice of
languages and the order is based on the current GNOME status, as
seen at [1].

Another thing are the users who could say, "hey, Windows comes in my
language, why doesn't Ubuntu?"; such area-localised CDs could be quite
popular.

Again, it's just a suggestion; I don't know a bit about the CD
preparation process and whether it would be a lot of work to create,
maintain and host such area-localised ISO images, but maybe it's worth
a thought.

[1] http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.10/top.html

Cheers,
-- Shot
-- 
              If I have pinged farther than others, it is because
              I routed upon the T3s of giants.    -- Greg Andrews
====================== http://shot.pl/hovercraft/ === http://shot.pl/1/125/ ===
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