Proposed Development Areas for Fedora Core 5 and Fedora Project

[Alan Cox]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 02:18:53PM +0200, Josep Puigdemont wrote:
> languages (en,de,fr,es,??) on the first two CDs. Big stuff like
> openoffice-lang-support for uncommon langages only in extras?"
> 
> That's a bad joke, right?

I hope so. Not because uncommon languages are any different to other
uncommon packages but because many "uncommon language" areas are those where
there is a lack of network connectivity and CD is king...

There are also political issues to be careful with and legal ones. Any language
policy would need to have a clear justification and be transparent to avoid
questions of racism in some countries. It would also want to consider legal
requirements and the business/political climate.

So in the case of Welsh there are good arguments for extras - fairly good
connectivity, relatively small language base. On the other hand you need
dual language support to get into schools/government/some other bodies as
well as to earn happy points with the powers that be.

French would be another example where there are definitive sensitivities and
even bigger questions that need care. Consider shipping English but not French
in Canada, or the size of the boom if someone put French as extras only.

Alan