On 2007.04.10. 16:22, Jancs wrote:
Hi!
I got a question from one large OO user regrding possibility to incorporate
lv_LV dictionary in official distro.
being the requester, i'll take the chance to comment on the issue ;)
the request came after i was told that one of the biggest complaints
about oo.org in here is not any missing feature, mso compatibility or
anything - it is the need to install the spellchecker separately (and in
a relatively cumbersome way).
While i like such idea, i do not like the possible result to what i may come -
inclusion of all existing dictionaries which meets licencing requirements.
In the same time - with all my respect to the authors etc.etc. - an average user
may even do not know where on the Earth, for example, Swahili is used or for
what purpose he gets Thai or Chech dictionaries, along with bunch of other
languages he definitely will never use.
i completely share this concern for several reasons (if not these, we
could include any dictionary we have available).
1. download and ondisk size. extracted, dict subdirectory (m206) takes
more than 50MB here. granted, it's much smaller when compressed (to
grasp the perspective i tested it - gzipped & bzipped are 16 & 14mb,
respectively), but that adds up for a bunch of downloads, and is more
noticeable when you have to push update to a thousand workstations.
2. runtime performance
i remember a lot of installed dics could bring oo.org down quite nicely.
i haven't followed the progress lately, and even though i guess it's
improved, adding all the available languages might put unnecessary
strain on users' systems.
What solutions i see:
1. do not include any dic at all, but to modify installator in the way it asks
for the necessary set of dictionaries during installation;
2. include some "imperial" languages like English, French, German, Spanish, but
in the same time giving to user the possibility to modify this set (add/remove)
during installation;
There, of course is some drawback - necessity to have internet connection which
i believe a _requirement_ to have internet connection would be
unaceptable...
could be solved by division of distro in two parts - (like KDE, for example) -
OO base package (platform dependent, including _limited_ set of dic or even just
two flavours of English) and dictionaries pack (platform
independent) to make this independent from internet connection.
...but having separate lang packages might work. of course, these should
be displayed _very_ prominently on the download page, especially after
the change is done.
given that dictionary data is more or less platform-independent (is it
?), that would make more or less single package for each language (and a
single compound package).
this would
a) reduce download size (which in turn reduces amount of data for
individual updates within organisations) and
b) make installing additional languages very easy by creating them as
native packages (distributions would just ship/create separate packages
as usual).
i guess we are not the first with the idea, so there probably is a
specification, or wiki page, or something - which already lists pros &
cons of such a change.
It is easier if you have fully localized OO, but there are not much of them.
The current approch is more or less OK for individual, but it becomes slightly
annoying if you have to do some 10-20 installations/updates a day
Janis
***
--
Rich
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