On Thu, Dec 14, 2006 at 01:05:45PM -0800, Danek Duvall wrote:

> >   But, for upstream sources, the correct place to localize (if ever
> >   done) would be upstream, no?
> 
> In general, yes, though if it's in Sun's interest to make sure that key
> technologies are localized (for certain locales), then we may choose to do
> the localizations and ship before they're accepted upstream (if they ever
> are).

Sun aside, I can see no reason to exempt these components from
community-adopted standards around l10n, or any other criteria.
Customers (of any OpenSolaris-based distribution) are entitled to a
consistent, high-quality experience with all the software we deliver
without regard for its origin.  It's my understanding that these
standards reflect our values and goals as an engineering community,
not only (or even at all) Sun's business interests.

> Regardless, as I understand it, localizations must be in distinct packages.

If a consolidation-global packages for localisable content (i.e.,
SUNWsfwman) are considered undesirable, and combining non-localisable
and localisable content infeasible for packaging reasons, have we
considered creating a per-component content package (and corresponding
l10n packages)?  That is, we might have:

SUNWcoreutils
SUNWcoreutils-man
SUNWcoreutils-doc

and then separate packages (whether delivered by a separate L10N team
or the content of the upstream component, if the latter meets our
requirements):

SUNWcoreutils-l10n-<locale>

That is, this approach would be similar to the one Laca described for
JDS, but at a finer granularity to alleviate the disconnect between
installed localised content and installed software; SUNWcoreutils-*
would depend on SUNWcoreutils.

Put another way, is there any technical reason the localised content
for a broad spectrum of software needs to be delivered in a single
per-locale package, or is this done as a convenience to reduce the
number of distinct packages we deliver?

In any case, I agree that we should not box ourselves into a
particular process for delivering the localisation files themselves
(regardless of the packaging conventions used to do so).  It may be
that delivery from a central committee is ideal, but it may also be
the case that some components should directly deliver localised
content.  It would seem that a finer-grained packaging convention
offers this flexibility.

-- 
Keith M Wesolowski              "Sir, we're surrounded!" 
FishWorks                       "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" 

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