[Dev] PyCon 2005 musings

[Ken Krugler]

Hi Jeffrey,

[snip]

>I also had a good long talk with Nick Bastin, who's working on Python
>bindings for ICU, a mature internationalization and localization package.

Did Nick give a talk on this? If so, is it available for download?

>My main interest in ICU was surrounding datetimes.  I'll say more about
>that in a separate email, but lest I forget, here I'll point out
>something Nick mentioned in passing:  ICU is approximately 8MB.  I
>balked at the idea of adding 8MB to our download size, he said MAYBE we
>could distribute different packages for different locales and lessen the
>ICU download hit.  I'd been expecting that we'd definitely be creating
>different locale packages, Nick made me realize this at least needs some
>discussion.

I've been dealing with ICU data size for a few months now, trying to 
shoehorn it into an embedded OS ROM. There is a lot of reducing you 
can do right away, by stripping out stuff like support for obscure 
IBM character encodings. After that you get into creating locale sets 
such as the EU, Japan, the Greater China area, and so on.

Bottom line is that it's pretty easy to get to the 1.5MB ... 2MB (per 
target locale(s)) data size. After that it's harder, but you could 
still trim, maybe down to 1MB for EU, a bit more for Japan, and 1.5MB 
for China/Taiwan/HK.

-- Ken
-- 
Ken Krugler
TransPac Software, Inc.
<http://www.transpac.com>
+1 530-470-9200