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now-outdated concern about saving disk space)

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. 

david
 
 
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