Possible projects/process ideas

Please note that we are done with this page, future project ideas should be posted under http://wikis.sun.com/display/g11n/OpenSolaris+Projects+Wish+List

We have divided the potential projects into i18n, l10n, community categories. See also a couple of questions at the end.

The following categories will be discussed in out Oct 8th meeting. We will work out the rest of the items through mail.
General infrastructure - libraries
General Utilities
Locale installation and administration
input methods
alternate input mechanisms
l10n infrastructure
Infrastrucutre for community

i18n

locale

• General infrastructure - libraries
  • ICU 4.0 - cover ICU4C and ICU4J (binary, source, developer, and a couple of bundled tools) - Owner - Rachel
  • libc i18n reimplementation - Owner - Osamu - Under discussion
    • Can we leverage glibc i18n code (LGPLv2)? If possible, we can share many codes between Linux and Solaris.
    • Replace current closed src
  • Multithreaded locale libraries- - Owner - Ienup - Waiting for the Single Unix Specification standard to get finalized-
  • Improve iconv modules - Owner - Osamu - Currently not planned
    • Refractor iconv framework, that using UCS4 as the medium encoding, A> UCS-4 ->B, so that we could largely reduce the number of shared objects in /usr/lib/iconv/-
    • support cross conversions among encoding A, B and C, currently 6 modules are needed (A<>B, A<>C, B<>C), but just 3 modules (A, B, C) like glibc.-
  • G11NInstall interface – Owner - Jan Trejbal - P1 - 2009.04{-}
    • Provide information about G11n elements (languages, locales, etc.), and about their packaging to Installer and other teams.
• General Utilities
  • Adopting mozilla's encoding auto-detection to solaris, to take place auto_ef – Owner - Yong -- P3 - 2009.10
  • Integrate Locale Creator in OpenSolaris + make it easy to contribute back (contrib repo). – Owner - Jan Lana{-} P1 - 2009.04-
  • localelauncher - We have done ARC and the initial documentation for this. – Owner - Suresh -- P1 - 2009.04
  • convmv - converts filenames from one encoding to another. Integrate convmv utility (http://www.j3e.de/linux/convmv/) – Owner - Jan Trejbal -- P2 - 2009.04
• Major ON projects
  • Zones - Owner - Asano-san ?
    • Implications with BrandZ
      • CR 6532100 run time paths should use $ORIGIN and hard coded locale paths - Owner - Honza
• Desktop
  • DSK-6: Metatracker g11n. Everything except PS search works for i18n text in metatracker. Work on PostSscript search ? (2008.11) - Owner - Suresh
  • DSK-7: Provide KDE 4.1 as an alternative desktop environment for those wishing to install it. Big chunk this work needs to make sure of the i18n status to be planned ? (2009.04) - Owner - Fujiwara-san
• Locale installation and administration
  • Language Selection tool to install/uninstall languge packages – Owner - Suresh -- P1 2009.10 - Depends on Jan's G11Ninstall library
  • G11n bits install mngmt using IPS tags – Owner - Asano-san -- *P1 2009.04 - Dependent on the IPS work.
    • Define file-based tags so that image-wide filters for language/locale/territory/etc. can be used to install G11N bits
    • PKG-2 Filters for language specific packages in the repository is a feature. Are we working together on this ? (2009.04) – Owner - Asano-san{-}
  • PKG-12: Most popular packages for each locale - Removed
  • INS-1 Feature - There is profile based installation for installer (2008.11), Installation language support in the profile ? – Owner - Asano-san -- P1 2009.04 (2009.10)
• new locales to be added - Owner - Jenda
  • Key CLDR locales
    • ka_GE (Georgia), be_BY (Belarus), es_US (Spanish - USA) - P1 - 2009.4
    • af_ZA (Afrikaans - South Africa) - P2 - 2009.4
    • az_AZ (Azerbaijan), ky_KG (Kyrgyzstan), it_CH (Italian - Switzerland) - P3 - 2009.4
    • more Arabic locales (some of ar_AE, ar_BH, ar_IQ, ar_JO, ar_KW, ar_LB, ar_OM, ar_QA, ar_SY, ar_YE, ar_DZ, ar_LY, ar_MA, ar_TN) - P1 - 2009.10
    • more African locales: st_ZA, zu_ZA, en_ZA (South Africa), en_ZW (Zimbabwe) fa_IR (Persian - Iran) P2 - 2009.10
    • European variants: ga_IE (Gaelic - Ireland), gl_ES (Galicean - Spain), sr_RS (Serbian - Serbia), sv_FI (Swedish - Finland) hy_AM (Armenian - Armenia) - P3 - 2009.10
  • Singapore
    • chinese jenda: will AGC work on this?
  • Euro variants for xx_CH.ISO8859 locales CR6630893 - P1 - 2009.4
• locale categories
  • Add more LC_ categories as in linux distros – Owner - Suresh{-}
• locale data
  • CLDR-1.6 locale data integration - Owner - Jenda - P1 - 2009.4
  • Check to see if we can reduce the size of locale data by sharing - Owner - TGC
  • Spell Checkers, Dictionaries
    • stardict 3.x integration on Solaris/OpenSolaris - Owner - Yong
    • Integrate Turkish spellchecker (https://zemberek.dev.java.net/) - Owner - Jan Trejbal
• General
  • manpage i18n enhancement - Make it possible to install only manpages with UTF-8 encoding instead of different encoding per locale. - Owner - Asano-san
  • Always display English message on Console (RFE) - Owner - Sayama-san
    • Avoid l10n messages are garbaged in multibyte locales (by setting LC_MESSAGES=C in /etc/default/init and then gdm overwrites it?) - Owner - TGC
  • Language/locale selection improvement for live session via GRUB menu (and installer?) - Owner - TGC

input

• input methods - Owner - Yong
  • Word input supplement via IM with spell check dictionaries - Owner - Osamu
    • Add IM engine to support word input supplement (like OpenOffice) for all applications to reduce typing # or typo. New function for English/EMEA users other than keyboard layout emulation.
  • Replace IIIMF with SCIM as the default input method in Live CD - Left to further discussion
    • Alternatively create a special LiveCD for zh_TW locale with SCIM as default
  • Integrate libm17n and scim-m17n to OpenSolaris to finish the stack of SCIM - P2 2009.04 (Work finished)
  • Track and contribute to the growth of ibus/imbus projects - P3
  • Modularize SunPinyin as shared libraries, and implement python binding - P3 2009.10
  • Improve the Pinyin scheme supports in SunPinyin - P2 2009.10
  • Support customized Hanja dictionaries for Hangul IM - P3 2009.04
• keyboards - Owner - Javier
  • GNOME Keyboard Handling (libgnomekbd) (Gnome-2.24 (2008.11))
    • User interface for choosing layouts not only per-country but also per-language
  • layouts - Owner - Javier
    • Migration of XKB keyboard layout data to new XKB data from community
    • Increase the number of EMEA Keyboard Layouts in IIIMF
  • virtual keyboards - Owner - Naoyuki
    • GNOME On-screen Keyboard (Gnome-2.24 (2008.11))
• alternate input mechanisms - Owner - Yong
  • Implement hand-writing recognition engine, and adapt it to IIIMF/SCIM framework - P2 2009.10
  • Speech to Text engines – Owner - Wiliam{-}
    • Improve the opensource'd TTS engine, espeak, for CJK languages - P3 2009.10

output

• Fonts - Owner - Honza
  • Add support for Thai fonts (http://linux.thai.net/projects/thaifonts-scalable) - P2 2009.04
  • No font glyphs are currently displayed with a sqare with the unicode value in it, MacOS do display the actual glyph shape in addition too, this will be useful for fallback fonts.
  • Need to work on output quality ?
• Font tools – Owner - Honza{-}
  • fntsample ([http://sourceforge.net/projects/fntsample/)
• Layout Engines - Owner - Fujiwara-san
  • Pango
    • Anything

printing

• FAM-2: mpage (print multiple pages per sheet) check if do have any i18n implication ?? (2009.10) – Owner - Suresh{-}
• gnome-print PS output looses the glyph encoding info and cannot search in it due to that. Fix this – Owner - Suresh{-}

interoperabity

• Windows - Owner - Fujiwara-san
  • Any samba related issues ?
• Linux - Owner - ??
• Virtual Environments - Owner - ??

standards

• Unicode 5.1 support - - Owner - I.S.
  • Update UTF-8 locale method shared object - to ensure that the UTF-8 locale common method shared object will be capable of handling all Unicode 5.1 characters for all UTF-8 locales in Solaris. This is a small project of RFE/bug-fix level, the related CR 6829160. Target release is April

testing - Owner - Hrusha

• Collect the target global user profiles and write mockup user scenarios and execute tests based on them to our offering fits in the customer requirement.
• Gnome
  • Gnome-2.24 (2008.11)
    • Web search included in startup menu. Check for multiscript search support.
    • GNOME Utils
      • Dictionary
        • Support for local files and wikipedia. Check for multiscript support.
    • Autocompletion in the file chooser entry has been reworked for Gnome-2.4. Test with multilingual content.
    • GTK+ compose sequences
      • Key compose sequences have been updated to match the latest X.org sequences
    • GTK+ no longer uses translations when the application itself is not translated to the current locale
  • GNOME 2.26 (2009.11 ?)
    • GNOME Control Center
    • Support for launching arbitrary commands via keybindings
    • Integration of free online web services into more apps, google/yahoo and wikipedia searches are embedded in desktop. Web services desktop clients need to be tested for multilingual text seach capabilities
• Major Desktop Apps
  • OpenOffice
    • 3.1 (2009 March) release
      • Arabic support
  • Thunderbird
    • • 3.0beta1 code freeze underway
      • planned 3.0 features with I18N implications
        • Auto UTF-8 conversion of composed mail is done
  • Firefox
    • Was not able to find future roadmaps items - From 3.0.2 release notes - some items with G11N implications
    • Official releases for Sinhala and Slovene are now available.
    • Beta releases for Bengali, Galician, Hindi, Icelandic, Kannada, Marathi, Telugu, and Thai are available for testing.
    • Fixed several theme issues that affected right-to-left locales.
    • On certain IDN sites, the password manager would not fill in username and password details properly.
    • Japanese, Korean, Chinese and Indic characters can not be entered (using IME) into text fields in Flash objects (bug 357670)
  • Evolution
    • Anything ?

l10n

installation

• Language package updates using the repo - Owner - Asano-san

l10n infrastructure

• LanuchPad implementation for OpenSolaris, 'Translate this Application' or even 'Translate message on this widge' – Owner - TGC{-}
• Pootle integration in Kenai – Owner - Suresh -- P1 2009.10
• Each GUI application will have a "Translate this app" menu entry when clicked this will take the user to web interface for translating the application. This can be optionally turned into instant installable l10n package for the user, enabling him to see the results of his work quickly. Owner - Suresh - P2 2009.10-
• Customer Information Access
  • command browser (in Development) – Owner - Jeffrey -- P1 2009.04
• Developer access to messages – Owner - Suresh -- P2 2009.10
  • Suntrans message browser
• Machine translation - Owner - Christof - Not scheduled as none of the currently available solutions are worthwhile spending time on -
  • Excellent machine translations mechanisms enable you chat with another user whose native language is different
  • -Investigate the opensource'd MT translation solutions, like apertium or moses to assist the community translators -

Documentation - *Owner - TGC *

• Gnome splash screens with localized images/text per locales
• Collection of localized themes/wallpapers to go with the distro (may be snaps of sceneries of country in the locale, combined with appropriated infused localized text like quotes by National heroes and such
• OpenSolaris content localization
  • Getting Started Guide
  • Demo
  • Tutorials
  • Manpages
  • DOC-2: Provide the user the opportunity of installing additional online help for the applications they use, as and when they need them. What about localized documentation. How it will fit in the picture. (2009.04)

Software messages - Not Tracked

• Major ON projects - Owner - Asano-san
  • ZFS
    • l10n implications for admin interface ?
• OpenOffice.org
• Desktop

• Installer
  • Greek and Hungarian community translated some of the installer messages. We hope to integrate those in a future release.

Community

FOSS

• I18n of externally contributed FOSS - Owner - Fujiwara-san

Community building - Owner - Rafaella

• Few events lined up for Software Freedom Day in Brazil, also tech days
• Create a program calling all non-English speakers to make their locale as the work desk and encourage them to file bugs.

Infrastrucutre for community - Owner - All

• Access - P1
• Contribution
  • man page translation by community - P1 - ongoing
  • Create light processes for community members to contribute - P1 - further
  • Create infrastructure projects for making community contributions easy, we can create infrastructure projects so that language experts can contribute to locales, keyboard, input methods etc - P1 - further

Processes for community - Owner - All

• contribution process
  • issue filing/tracking process

Questions

• There was one activity in i18n-discuss community by one contributor (student?). What's the current status?
• Need to check if engineers who had read the current code, can participate in the development.