Subject: Size Matters? [was Re: adding ispell hash files]
From: Alan (horkana@tcd.ie)
Date: Sat Mar 31 2001 - 16:45:25 CST
Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> >Also, where should we put any additional dictionaries? The default
> >american.hash is located in abidistfiles, but this is a required
> >package while the extra dictionaries should be optional; we are
> >talking about fairly large files, possibly 2M+, so I think we should
> >make them available individually. Perhaps we might want to create
> >a new CVS module 'abioptional' and put the dictionaries in a
> >directory 'dictionaries' within it, probably providing a tgz and zip
> >versions of each dictionary, and adding a link at the webpage. Any
> >objections/suggestions?
>
> I want to not distribute any dictionaries besides maybe en-US *with* the
> binary. I'm proposing that we have a download page with instructions online
> somewhere for other working hash files. Otherwise abidistfiles (or any other
> module for that matter) will be huge.
Your comments about size, and making the dictionaries optional reminded me that
I was thinking along these line and have a suggestion, based on my observations
of how mozilla does it.
i suggest we implement a locale directory like Mozilla, which would contain all
language specific files eg help, templates, strings, dictionary
i would further suggest that the locale directory would be in the Abisuite
directory, with sub directorys for fr-FR, de-DE, etc.
This would allow more flexibility in how Abiword is distributed
you could have the default build with everything in it,
and then a minmal build with just en-US (for those still running off 28k modems)
and separate language packs that you could unzip into the locale directory
and since Abiword already has a built in gzip* encoder decoder you could gzip
them into a langpack eg. abi_lang_fr-FR.tar.gz and not have to worry about users
having a archiver on their system.
(* I think the zipped abiword documents are very elegant and impressive
solution, kudos)
A quick experiment shows the Abiword windows binary on its own is 2192k and it
.zips to 1147k. Abi is still almost small and sleek enough to fit on one floppy
disk
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