On 6 December 2010 08:11, Q overlordq@gmail.com wrote:
I think better time would be spent decoupling all the languages. Out the 57 megs for an svn export, 41 is the languages directory. Distribute the Big $foo, where $foo is some reasonable number of major languages, and offer the rest as a seperate dl.
This suggestion seems to come up from time to time. I feel it is unrealistic. First of all we can't remove them from svn, since they have to be there. We could remove them from the tarballs, but please, last time I checked the tarball was hardly over 12 megs. Even with very slow modem it should take an hour at most to download that. Using better compression algorithm would likely shrink it as much as removing few languages. The minor languages don't even take as much space as the major languages, which usually have more complete localisation.
Drawing the line is not easy and would likely cause continuous, unnecessary contention, put some languages in a privileged position and hurt MediaWiki's top notch i18n and l10n support. Each language is special, but you don't see that if you just look at the number of speakers. Do we really want hurt one of our greatest advantages?
Besides, it feels silly to talk about this, while we simultaneously talk about including some of the most common extensions in the name of providing feature complete MediaWiki straight from the box--which is a goal I agree with.
-Niklas