Alistair Vining <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> I can't answer your question, but does anyone know what drugs the authors
*> were on? The list of locales includes:
>
> gv_GB Manx Gaelic UNITED KINGDOM and
> kw_GB Cornish UNITED KINGDOM
As the author of the Cornish & Manx support so far, even I don't advocate
making such support mandatory for Linux; the opposite, in fact.
The list of locales in the spec appears to be a union of all the locales
currently available for Linux/Unix (there are Manx & Cornish locales in
Mandrake 7.*). I think hard-defining the list of languages in a spec is
dangerous, as it is unscalable, and will lead to people _dropping_ language
support rather than adding it (imagine commerical distros deciding to drop
support unless everything is translated into that language, because
half-translations look unprofessional, for example).
The POSIX / Linux locale support is scalable in that new language support
can
be easily added at will : no 8-bit language ID field, when there are over
5000 languages in the world, for example. Also in free software, minority
language supporters can just add support for their language, rather than
depend on a
company finding the language 'commercially viable', as in the MS & Icelandic
saga.
Developers should ensure that new locale support can be easily dropped in,
and avoid scalability bugs such as:
- drop down lists of 'all' languages
- Loading locale support for all languages with each app / RPM
(eg a 20 kb applet with several hundred kb of translation files)
Better to try designing automatic update support for languages rather
than assume they are 'frozen in' to the distribution, eg. If I log in to a
machine in Mexico, and the login reads language support LC_CTYPE=ga for
Irish
from a directory, I don't expect Irish translations & support to be already
present, but they may be auto-updated & cached from some web site, for
example.
I wrote the Manx / Cornish support (locale & minor translations) for two
main
reasons:
(1) A heads-up to developers that there are more languages than they are
currently thinking of
(2) To show language supporters that it could be done (There are actually
speakers, including native speakers, of these languages despite what the
encyclopaedias say). This is important, as it allows them to raise the
profile
of the language and use it more frequently in daily life.
I used Manx & Cornish because they are close to Irish which I speak, not
because
they are more important than other minority languages used in daily life.
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
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Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/lists/
