Re: Random thoughts

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh farsiweb info>]

On Thu, 2005-08-11 at 08:17 -0400, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> > 1) If we want to make it use a liberal license, like BSD/MIT, we
> > shouldn't merge.
> 
> Not necessarily.  We should merge.  We should go BSD.

But glocale borrows lots of LGPL code from glibc. We can't change the
license for that code.

> > 2) If we merge, we should probably need to move it outside GNOME. We
> > will lose a wonderful community, who are both very friendly, and
> > generally have a diverse knowledge of i18n and l10n issues (from Owen
> > Taylor to several localization teams).
> 
> No, we don't have to (or should) move.  Why do you think so?

Let me reword. Either glocale should move out of gettext or we should
move out of GNOME.

> You definitely have no idea what it means to go without mmap
> cache. Either keep our word, or go read fontconfig archives.  Parsing
> XML locales at runtime would mean miliseconds of time and
> hundreds kilobytes of memory /per-application/.  Just forget
> about it.  About the exchanging thing, aren't fonts exchangable
> nowadays?  Why do you run fc-cache then?  Lets just copy Keith
> Packard, whatever you can think of, he's been there long ago ;).

I'm not understanding some of what you are talking about. I'm probably
too ignorant about memory and CPU optimizations. Would you care to
reword or at least provide some pointers or quotes from parts of the
fontconfig archive you are talking about?

About fonts, the situation is different. First of all, no, they are not
exchangable. They are not even exchangable across different Microsoft
platforms.

About locale exchange, CLDR probably talks about moving things like five
lines of configuration data around. Let's assume that in the future a
dynamic web page may ask for the user's locale settings, and the browser
would answer that it's CLDR 2.7's "de_DE collation=phonebook" with the
medium date format changed to something instead of the default.

That's the kind of thing CLDR is thinking about, I believe. Are you
saying that parsing that in runtime is practically impossible and should
be avoided at all costs? Or something else?

> All these are really details on the scale that I think about it.
> Lets design the components, not micro-features of one.

Sure. It was only random thoughts.

roozbeh