David John Burrowes wrote: > I'm not necessarily the target market for Solaris... so take my > comments with a grain of salt. > > Still, some competitive info at this moment in time: - The WinXP > installers I've worked with install all locale info, but the Asian > stuff isn't enabled (and thus I assume compressed somewhere in the > installation on the hard disk) by default - In the Mac 10.3 installer > (I forget about 10.4) the east asian locales were not installed by > default. > > From the experiential standpoint: > I am a user who uses multiple input methods for multiple languages, > and so I'm used to having to dig around to install my needed > languages. I understand the concerns for disk space which I assume > are the primary motivation for the points above. I doubt the > installation times are so different as to cause me grief (maybe 32 vs > 30min, at worst :-), so I accept the pain the vendors put me through. > (the current Solaris installer does make it a bit of a nuisance for > me to say "give me all" though) > > At the same time, it frustrates me when I walk up to a system and the > user didn't put the locale I need on the system. It isn't hard for > me to rectify this on Windows, but I do hate mucking with someone's > setup just so I can type "hi" to someone. :-) (but, as a technical > person, I understand I'm just being bitten by someone's now-outdated > concern about saving disk space) >
I don't know that it's an outdated concern yet. Brian Yuan's numbers indicate a 10-20% space increase over a full install to add all the locales if we did it right now; that's a large enough number that I can't just consider it an easy choice. But the Windows compression scheme you mention is a creative way of addressing it. We can think about some options like that. > Strategic concern: My sense is that the world is getting smaller, and > we definitely want more and more folks to be adopting and using > OpenSolaris all around the world. To me, that suggests that having > all the locales there by default (or getting them there very easily) > is strategically important. > > Practical point: At this point, the desktop experience is not fully > localized. Last I saw there's a special separate version of > OpenOffice for east asian locales. > > I don't mean with this post to suggest a particular direction for > localization issues. I just wanted to add them to the pot of issues > to consier. > Yeah, we definitely will need to consider it. I agree that the world is getting smaller and the expectations in this area are getting higher, so I don't expect we'll just go with the status quo. Dave
