Niklas Laxström wrote:
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
A few days ago the issue came up where I was talking with an end user
who was complaining about MediaWiki being too large (in the server, not
in the tarball) compared to other apps like wordpress.
I think there's a use case for providing a mediawiki download where the
end user can check which languages they want and provide a custom download.
And/or document how to strip some languages from mediawiki.